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CiJEfRIGHT DEPOam 



HAVE WE A FAR EASTERN 
POLICY? 



OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME 
AUTHOR 



MODERNIZING THE MONROE DOCTRINE 

FRENCH MEMORIES OF EIGHTEENTH- 
CENTORY AMERICA 

STAINED GLASS TOURS IN FRANCE 

STAINED GLASS TOURS IN ENGLAND 

A STAINED GLASS TOUR IN ITALY 



Have We a Far Eastern 
Policy ? 



Br 
CHARLES H. SHERRILL 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

Hon. DAVID JAYNE HILL, LL.D 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1920 



115 5-1? 



Copyright, 1920, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published April, 1920 



APh c:J lb2U 



ICLA586781 



TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED PARENTS 

CHARLES HITCHCOCK SHERRILL 

AND 

SARAH WYNKOOP SHERRILL 

31 J^cbicate 

THIS BOOK UPON LANDS WHERE VENERATION OF ANCESTORS 
IS THE CORNERSTONE OF CIVILIZATION 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. At the Pacific Crossroads .... 1 

II. Some Mental Geography .... 22 

III. A Bridge of Boats 35 

IV. Leaves from a Notebook .... 60 

V. Some Old Kyoto Gardens and Their 

Thought .... 105 

VI. Japanese Pilgrims and Their Pil- 
grimages 141 

VII. Shantung and Korea versus the White 

Peril 168 

VIII. The Yellow Peril Bogey . . . .193 

IX. A Philippine Republic? . . . . . 214 

X. A Japanese Point of View . . . . 244 

XI. The Five Stripes of China's Flag . . 253 

XII. And What of Australia ? 282 

XIII. Some Conclusions . 297 



INTRODUCTION 

As a diplomatist and as an author, General 
Sherrill does not require to be introduced to the 
American public. His books are weU known to 
the lovers of a fascinating branch of art and to 
those who are interested in international ques- 
tions. In the present volume he^lisplays a com- 
bination of the quahties which characterize his 
earlier writings, a fine sensibility to form and 
color, and a grasp of great political issues. 

To those readers who have not traversed the 
Pacific Ocean and visited its picturesque islands 
and Asiatic coastlands, this book will be a de- 
lightful voyage of discovery, and even those who 
have lingered long in the countries described will 
deem it a privilege to see them anew through 
the eyes of so keen an observer as General Sher- 
rill. But the chief value of this volume does 
not consist in the vividness with which Oriental 
life and its conditions are depicted, nor in the 
narrative of the writer's personal experiences. 
It is a distinctively personal book, but in an 
altogether different sense. 

It is written with knowledge, but it overflows 



X INTRODUCTION 

with imagination. It is not merely what the 
writer sees and causes us to see that most ap- 
peals to our interest, it is what he thinks about 
what he has seen and the significance of the peo- 
ples he describes to themselves, to the future of 
America and to the world. He has striven to 
understand as well as to observe, and to help 
us to realize the problems of the lands of the 
Pacific. 

As an economist closely conversant with the 
commercial life of his own country thi'ough long 
and extensive contact with its chambers of com- 
merce, and especially as a diplomatist habituated 
to consider the interests and the opportunities 
of American enterprise. General Sherrill has a 
claim upon our attention which the ordinary 
traveller does not possess. He visualizes the 
Pacific as a new and vast field for the develop- 
ment of future civilization, in which the East and 
the West must of necessity commingle, in some 
sense as co-partners, and in some sense as rivals. 
He has chosen a great and timely theme and he 
has given it an attractive exposition. 

In entering into this field General Sherrill has 
of necessity raised many questions which are of 
a controversial nature. It is in his treatment 
of these that he appeals most strongly to the 
attention of thoughtful men. Japan, China, 



INTRODUCTION xi 

the Philippines all furnish opportunity for differ- 
ences, and even for conflicts of opinion. He has 
to contend with much ignorance, prejudice, and 
opposition of interests. In this, I am sure, he 
neither needs nor desires a defender. He has 
spoken out vahantly for what he believes to be 
true, and has not hesitated to support any belief 
because it may in certain quarters be unpopular. 
It adds to the pleasure of penning these words 
of introduction to General Sherrill's book to feel 
the assurance that he speaks on every subject 
with firm conviction; and it cannot fail to com- 
mand the respect of every reader that, while he 
perceives and appreciates the dangers latent in 
the problems of the Pacific, he counsels caution, 
moderation, and fair play on all sides, in spite 
of prejudice, as essential to the peace and pros- 
perity of the peoples of the Pacific. 

David Jayne Hill. 



FOREWORD 

Cektain great world movements which had 
their birth in 1867 have always had especial in- 
terest for the writer, for he, too, was born then. 
In that year William H. Seward, that farseeing 
Secretary of State, purchased Alaska from Rus- 
sia — "Seward's Folly," they called it, but it made 
a Pacific Ocean power of us. Also the four 
hundred milhons of gold it has since yielded 
proves "Seward's Folly" to be the most profit- 
able investment we ever made. In 1867 Bis- 
marck concluded his arrangements to double 
Prussia's striking power by adding to it that of 
Austria, reduced to submission by her defeat the 
year before. Thus really began the great Ger- 
man Empire, for after this 1867 birth, the defeat 
of France in 1870 and the crowning of a German 
Kaiser were but public confirmation of an estab- 
lished fact. 1868 is the birth date of the Do- 
minion of Canada, since become a Pacific Ocean 
Power, and destined by the similarity of her 
Asiatic inmiigration policy to that of Australia 
and our West Coast to demonstrate with us the 



xiv FOREWORD 

strength of the Anglo-Saxon racial tie in pre- 
serving peace around the great western ocean. 
In 1867 Sir Charles Dilke predicted that "the 
relations of America and Australia will be the 
key to the future of the Pacific." Admiral Jelli- 
coe has recently recommended that the principal 
naval base of the British Navy be transferred 
from the North Sea to Singapore, the western 
gateway to the Pacific, and Australia and Can- 
ada will probably control the future policy of 
that mighty force in those waters. In October, 
1867, the last of the long line of Japanese Sho- 
guns resigned his power, the Imperial Govern- 
ment passed from the hands of Viceroys direct 
to the Emperor, and thus was born the new 
Japan. 

And what has happened since 1867? The 
Pacific Ocean has seen come to power two great 
autocracies, Germany and Japan, and three 
democracies, the United States, Canada and 
Australia. One of these autocracies, Germany, 
after a vigorous acquisition of Pacific Colonies, 
has, because of unwise leadership, disappeared 
from that ocean. The other autocracy, Japan, 
because of wise leadership, is to-day growing 
in power more rapidly than ever before. This 
surviving and advancing autocracy shares the 
control of those waters with the world's greatest 



FOREWORD XV 

democracies — the United States, and Great 
Britain, represented by Australia and Canada, 
all speaking the same language and with the 
same traditions. It is high time we turned our 
gaze westward and gave consideration to the 
situation there as readjusted by the great war. 

The United States is bounded on the south by 
the Monroe Doctrine, on the east by our oppor- 
tunity of service to stricken Europe, on the north 
by the Anglo-Saxon racial tie, and on the west 
by the Japanese problem. Of our western out- 
look alone we know but little, and should know 
more. Now that the arbitrament of arms has 
decided the question against whose decision all 
OEurope was long arming, the next great question 
that confronts the world and especially ourselves 
is — shall the Pacific Ocean continue pacific? 

In the following pages are some suggestions 
resulting from nearly a year's travel and observa- 
tion around the Pacific's shores and upon its 
islands. They are the views of an earnest be- 
liever in the Monroe Doctrine, which teaches that 
nations, like individuals, should mind their own 
business, something which cannot be done unless 
we first learn what our business is and needs. 
Never so much as to-day have our people evi- 
denced so widespread an appreciation of what 
the Monroe Doctrine means, has meant, and can 



xvi FOREWORD 

mean to us. But are we equally enlightened 
concerning what our policy should be upon and 
across the Pacific? 

Charles H. Shereill. 

20, East 65th Street, 
New York City. 



HAVE WE A FAR EASTERN 
POLICY? 



HAVE WE A FAR EASTERN 
POLICY? 

CHAPTER I 

AT THE PACIFIC CROSSEOADS 

Did you ever think of the Hawaiian Islands as 
the pitcher's box of the Pacific Ocean, or as the 
crossroads refreshment pavilion where products 
and sights of all those far-flung lands could be 
sampled without bothering to visit them? Per- 
haps the first viewpoint will throw light upon the 
problem of power in the Pacific, and the second 
beckon you thither. 

In the first place, let us lay out our diamond. 
The home-plate will be California, and from there 
we will run our base line out to Japan, which will 
be first base. No scoring will be possible unless 
you get to and around that point. The first 
baseman may sometimes play a little off his base, 
so as to cover more territory, as baseball men 
say. When he does that he will be standing on 
China! Second base will be our Philippine base. 
It is essential to have a good player covering this 

1 



2 AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 

bag so as to handle throws from the home-plate 
(CaHfornia) to head off runners coming around 
from first base (Japan), for nobody will ever 
endanger the home-plate if you can throw him 
out at second base. The first man we played in 
that important position (May 1, 1898), Admiral 
Dewey, was one of the sharpest infielders we ever 
had, careful, but quick to act on his own initiative, 
and especially good at completing a play. His 
first move was to put out a Spaniard, who thought 
himself safe, but was not used to quick play, 
and immediately thereafter he put out a German 
Admiral, who tried to steal the base. Third base 
is Australia. This difficult position is being well 
covered by a player who, although comparatively 
new at that corner of the diamond, learned the 
game on other fields where Anglo-Saxon sport 
prevails. He is a fine hitter, as appears from 
his sending 430,000 men to fight in France from 
his population of only five million, and that, too, 
without conscription! The pitcher's box (our 
Hawaiian Islands) did not favor efficient pitch- 
ing until the great naval base at Pearl Harbor 
was completed, but now it affords every facility 
for speedy delivery of the ball, not only to the 
home-plate, but also to any corner of the dia- 
mond. The pitcher (the United States ISTavy) 
is growing stronger all the time, has excellent 



AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 3 

control of the ball and is well trained. He is 
especially experienced at strike-outs, is good- 
humored, never quarrels with the umpire, and 
the longer the game the better he pitches. He 
says he feels quite at home in his new pitcher's 
box, and is ready for work the moment there is 
a batter up. That concludes a baseball view of 
international strategy around the Pacific. 

A relief map of the island of Oahu reveals at 
a glance the natural advantages of Pearl Har- 
bor. Imagine three large harbors, side by side, 
and opening into each other, lying four miles 
inland, reached from the sea by a single deep 
channel through the coral reef, sufficiently wind- 
ing to be easily defended and yet, thanks to the 
steepness of its coral banks, giving deep water 
right alongside all the docks. So deep is it that 
when the entrance channel was being dredged, 
the contractors actually dumped the refuse into 
the middle of the harbor, because the water there 
was over 200 feet deep. Built into the side of 
one of the three harbors is a great drydock, long 
enough to receive a thousand-foot ship, if and 
when she ever comes along. It took nine years 
to build, and it looks it. The wireless plant is 
so powerful that it talks with the Eiffel Tower 
in Paris! The facilities for coaling and oihng 
ships are of the very latest type. Around the 



4 AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 

outside of the great coal piles runs a high con- 
crete wall, reminding one of the exterior of a 
huge modern college football stadium. You 
imagine that its strength is intended for defense, 
but are surprised to learn that you are really 
looking at the elevated shores of a dry lake, 
built, so that if the coal within gets afire, it can 
be flooded and the fire promptly extinguished. 
To one motoring back of and above Pearl Har- 
bor, through the miles on miles of pale green 
sugar cane or the long stretches of greenish silver 
pineapples, the great harbor looks like three 
peaceful Scottish lakes, with peaked hills thrown 
aroimd about them, but nature's "protective 
coloring" is but camouflaging one of the world's 
great strongholds, not only for defense, but also, 
if necessary, for decisive offense. The accom- 
panying map, with steaming routes and distances 
laid out upon it, show that Pearl Harbor bears 
the same relation to the Pacific that Malta does 
to the Mediterranean. It is, however, of far 
greater strategic significance here than is Malta 
in its waters, because the Pacific distances are so 
much greater that a naval force intending to 
launch an attack against our side of that ocean 
dare not leave Hawaii unreduced behind it. 
Coahng or oiling for a trip across the Pacific, 
and naval operations thereafter, is a problem 



AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 




6 AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 

which lies far beyond those of Mediterranean 
dimensions. 

So much for the baseball view of the Pacific, 
in which we have gazed upon that distant scene 
from the bleachers beloved of all American 
youth, and have cheerfully contemplated possi- 
biHties of a contest, which, in our heart of hearts, 
we hope will never come to pass. Now for our 
second digression from the beaten path of tourist 
description — ^what about the Hawaiian Islands 
as a refreshment pavilion, standing at the cross- 
roads of the Pacific, where travellers may sample 
the viands and life of all its furthermost corners. 
I, alas! spent but five weeks in that anchored 
Paradise, but it needed only one day to justify 
''refreshment'* as an exact description. It is a. 
great mistake to think of Hawaii as merely a 
stop-over point on the way to the Orient, and 
not as worth a visit for itself alone. You can 
sample the Orient by visiting Hawaii and going 
no farther. Its 110,000 Japanese generally wear 
their native costume, have their temples, gardens, 
etc., and so do the numerous Chinese population, 
likewise the Koreans and Filipinos, The Japa- 
nese and Chinese shops are fascinating. To 
complete the picture, trees, plants and fruits of 
the Orient grow about you in profusion, brought 
hither to save the lazy traveller from further 



AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 7 

travel. There are no snakes, and there are a 
great variety of automobile drives. The original 
missionaries (thanks to whom the islands are now 
American) must have had trouble describing to 
the natives a heaven more alluring than the land 
in which they were living! You have, of course, 
heard that the climate is nearly perfect — com- 
fortably warm, but constantly tempered by a 
northerly trade wind — is practically the same 
in every month of the year, confining its extreme 
ranges within 59° and 89° on the thermometer. 
A tropical land where Caucasians can work in 
the fields, and where no malarial mosquitoes 
exist — think of it! But have you heard that the 
rain, although sufficient to keep vegetation beau- 
tifully green and clean, has the pleasing practice 
of descending so gently and without sun-obscur- 
ing clouds that it is locally known as "liquid 
sunshine," and never necessitates an umbrella! 
Sunstroke is unheard of, and yet the sea is so 
warm (averagijig 74°) that one stays in the sin-f 
with utter disregard of time limitations usual 
at Atlantic beaches. Furthermore, moonlight 
swimming parties are comfortable and popular. 
The Coney Island joys of "shooting the chutes" 
pale before those of riding a surfboard or an 
outrigger canoe through the Waikiki waves ; you 
might as well compare a wooden hobby-horse 



8 AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS / 

/ 

with a gallop in the open air! I have been there 
in August, in January and September, and there 
seemed but little difference in the climate, even 
for swimming, for the shallow water inside the 
long reef is sun heated to about the same tem- 
perature the year round. The daytime warmth 
is comfortably offset by the cool nights, which 
always necessitate the use of a blanket. 

You see we shall have no difficulty in justify- 
ing our use of the word "refreshment" in describ- 
ing Hawaii, and the accompanying map shows 
that "crossroads" is equally well selected. From 
us to the Orient, from Australasia to Canada, or 
any way that one crosses the Pacific, it is con- 
venient, nay, almost necessary, to touch at Hono- 
lulu, so they aU do it, and you have only to sit 
there and watch them arrive — ships of aU sizes, 
from every sort of land, manned by every type of 
sailormen. The entire merchant marine of that 
great ocean serves as delivery wagons to Hawaii's 
front door. If you want anything, they bring it 
to you, and frequently they make delectable of- 
ferings which you did not know about, and for 
that reason alone, did not theretofore want. If 
you have Missouri blood in your veins, and desire 
to be "shown," here follow sundiy specifications. 
That delectable pink peptonized melon on your 
breakfast table is the papaya, and originally came 



AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 9 

from Australia, where it is called pawpaw. The 
picturesque ricefields with their small squares of 
soft greens moved hither overseas from China. 
The favorite banana here (they have thirty vari- 
eties, and there are fields on fields of them) came, 
the shorter ones from China, and the taller, 
grown near the houses, from Brazil. The bird 
that looks like a mocking-bird wearing yellow 
spectacles is the myna of India. The swift-flying 
blue-gray dove is Australian. The pointed 
nosed, rakish oxen patiently plowing acres of 
innumerable small, ankle-deep rectangular ponds 
for rice or taro-plants are the caribao of the 
Philippines, friendly to brown skins but truculent 
toward pale-faces. And so it is with the abun- 
dant plants and trees, hundreds and thousands of 
varieties, assembled from all over the world, use- 
ful or beautiful or quaintly interesting. Here 
may be seen the spreading banyan of India, each 
tree a grove in itself, sacred to the Brahmins 
because it was into a banyan that Brahma was 
transformed. On May 15th it is worshipped by 
all Brahmin women. With rare catholicity there 
also grows alongside of it the peepul tree, under 
which India believes that Buddha was incar- 
nated, or, if you are a Burmese Buddhist and 
believe that this fact, so significant to the Far 
East, occurred under an asoka tree, that also 



10 AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 

grows here. American women know the ylang 
ylang perfume ; here they may see that obhgmg 
tree which not only yields them the scent, but 
also garlands for their South Sea Island sisters, 
while its soft white wood serves for canoes in 
Samoa and tom-toms for the Malays. For the 
newly arrived tourist the most outstanding color 
effect comes from the trees, the masses of yellow- 
ish red of the royal poinciana of Madagascar, 
or the yellow of the Ceylon poinciana, or the 
wistaria-shaped blossoms of three trees meeting 
together from distant points, — the golden shower 
of Ceylon, the pink shower of the Caribbean 
Sea, and the pink and white shower of India. 
Over eighty species of palm adorn the land- 
scape, chief among them being the royal palm 
of Cuba, forming stately avenues whose color 
and marking suggest columns of poured concrete 
topped by green waving capitals; the Chinese 
fan palm; the traveller's palm of Madagascar; 
that world-citizen, the date palm ; and most grace- 
ful of all, indigenous to these islands, and there- 
fore welcoming to its shores its foreign cousins, 
the gracefully leaning, swaying cocoanut palm. 
Other native trees are the koa or Hawaiian 
mahogany, used extensively for furniture, its 
reddish honey-colored wood taking a high polish; 
the intensely hard ohia, with tough fiber and 



AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 11 

moisture-proof quality fitting it excellently for 
fenceposts, railroad ties and fine flooring; the 
hau, whose branch-interlacings make it impene- 
trable in the forest, but very useful for arbors 
and pergolas when grown "in captivity"; and 
lastly the kukui, of both practical and aesthetic 
service, for a string of its oily nuts burnt one 
after another used to provide lights for the 
natives, while its pale, heart-of-lettuce foliage 
brightens the hillside gullies in odd fashion, 
putting high lights where one expects deep 
shadows. 

The Australian flame tree vies in its strong 
vermilion with the frequent hedges of gayly 
striped and mottled croton shrubs from the 
Moluccas or Spice Islands. Among the plainer 
but more useful immigrants are the West Indian 
monkeypod tree, affording a shade as grateful 
as it is wide-spreading ; the endurable Kauri pine 
of New Zealand ; that other useful shade tree the 
Tahiti umbrella tree, its dark green foliage en- 
livened by an occasional red leaf; the breadfruit 
tree, with its succulent food product and decora- 
tive foliage of deeply dentated leaves ; fiber plants 
for fishnets, ropes, etc. ; and best of all, the alga- 
roba — the al-korab of Palestine, whose pods or 
husks fed the swine tended by the Prodigal Son, 
and which since its arrival in 1828 has spread 



12 AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 

all over the islands. You see Chinese and Japa- 
nese children everywhere filling their little bags 
with algaroba pods. And the flowering vines! 
their profusion is bewildering — a wild orgy of 
coloring! I shall never forget the aspect of a 
house out beyond Fort Shafter smothered in in- 
terlacing bougainvillea and alamander — a start- 
ling glory of purple and yellow to make even 
Bakst jealous. 

Now does the reader agree with our use of the 
word "refreshment," or has he no eyes to be 
refreshed ! Nor need one seek out all this beauty ; 
it lies at hand all about you. Take the trolley 
from Honolulu out to Waikiki Beach, and for 
four miles you ride between gorgeous hedges of 
oleander, hybiscus or glowing croton plants, 
shadowed by flowering trees or gorgeous vines. 
And in such prodigal profusion! Oahu College 
is shut in from the street by a mile-long hedge 
of night-blooming cereus, whose wealth of great 
white blossoms, slowly opening as the dark comes 
on, suggest the illumination of many electric 
lights ! 

Man, or rather woman, has had about as much 
to do with assembling all this beauty as nature, 
and other cities will do well to pattern after the 
"Outdoor Circle of Honolulu." The energetic 
women who compose it have not only succeeded 



AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 13 

in improving street cleaning methods, and then 
in beautifying those streets by public and private 
planting of decorative trees, shrubs and flowers, 
but also have reduced to the vanishing point dis- 
figuring advertisement signs. This last reform 
was effected by applying the economic boycott 
system; and it worked as promptly as efficiently. 
This same "Outdoor Circle" also carried on a 
successful campaign to abolish tenements, with 
the result that they have been replaced by num- 
bers of cheap but sightly and comfortable bunga- 
lows, adapted to the climate by ample provisions 
of verandas, or lanai (as they are called in 
Hawaii) , life upon which, in the midst of hanging 
baskets of vines and flowers is there so general 
and beneficial. Just as the Dutch of old New 
York City loved and lived upon their stoop, or 
door steps, so the Hawaiian spends all his leisure 
time on his lanai. 

Not only can all these charming things be seen 
from near at hand, but also from a number of 
scenic viewpoints, more, in fact, than any other 
charming place can boast. Drive or walk up 
Pacific Heights, or the higher Tantalus Road, or 
that oddly shaped extinct crater hospitably 
known as the Punchbowl, and not only will you 
look down upon unsurpassed scenes combining 
sea, mountain, foliage and color, but also upon 



14 AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 

frequent developments of those delights while 
mounting and descending. If by nature you 
enjoy surprises, — prefer to take your strong 
drink in one startling gulp, ask to be taken to the 
Pali. What is the Pali? You will drive for 
half an hour, 1200 feet up the Nuuanu Valley, 
through a throng of handsome homes set in 
handsomer grounds, up past the cosy Oahu 
Country Club, all the fairway of whose golf 
course has turf like English putting greens 
(honest! I am a golfer myself), up through a 
rapidly ascending mountain pass growing con- 
stantly narrower until it reminds you of Ther- 
mopylae. Nothing in the slbwly closing moun- 
tain walls promises anything of a view, nay, 
it forebodes the opposite — all is quiet and con- 
fined. A sudden turn of the road brings you 
into a perfect blast of wind, — you look down — 
impossible! Spread out below you is one of 
Nature's most stupendous views — bleak moun- 
tains 3500 feet high herding between them smil- 
ing valleys far beneath, sloping gently out to 
the smiling sea, into which are thrust rocky head- 
lands. It is told of the conqueror King Kame- 
hameha that in his last fight against the Oahuans 
he drove their army slowly up this pass and then 
over this rocky precipice. A sudden end to a 
great struggle, and as you listen to the groaning 



AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 15 

and moaning of the high wind that always blows 
here the story seems very real and present. 

Little is definitely known of the early history 
of the islands or their folk. Fortunately they are 
a musical people, and it is from the words of 
their old songs handed down through many gen- 
erations, that we learn of their past. In this man- 
ner, from history embalmed in song, we gather 
enough to permit the conclusion that the islands 
were settled about 500 A. D., by Polynesians 
from the South Seas, who came across the great 
stretches of water in fleets of rude canoes, steer- 
ing by the stars; and that there were two distinct 
periods of migration, the first purely legendary, 
and later, after a considerable interval, another 
one from either Samoa or Tahiti or both, in the 
11th or 12th century. Why was this? Were 
there shifts in the ocean currents which only at 
times favored such voyages in that direction? 
And if so, when and why were those favoring 
conditions altered? A systematic study of the 
subject is now under way and enlightenment 
therefrom is confidently expected. It is clear 
from the physical characteristics of the Hawaii- 
ans, from their customs, and from their language 
(which is similar to that of the Maoris of Xew 
Zealand) that they come of that great Poly- 
nesian stock whose original home is believed to 



16 AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 

be the Island of Savaii, one of the Samoan group. 
Those interested in such ethnological studies will 
find a treat in store for them in the Bishop 
Museum, where are many examples of the kapa 
or tapa clothing, beaten out by women from 
soaked bark, and dyed or stamped with patterns 
carved on bamboo; kahili, or colored feather 
standards carried as emblems of rank; plans of 
temple ruins; and best of all, those marvellous 
feather capes, all yellow and scarlet, priceless 
because two feathers only grew on the breast of 
a single bird. These capes took years to make, 
and by computing the cost of the labor expended 
thereon plus that of the great number of birds 
necessary (which were rare), it is calculated that 
a large cape, such as a king wore, is worth over; 
a million dollars. They are kept in a specially 
designed safe of large dimensions adapted for 
convenient display of its treasures. 

A Hawaiian landscape would not be complete 
without a sugar cane field or great stretches de- 
voted to pineapples. Not only do they delight 
the optic nerve but also that other most important 
nerve which stretches from the heart to the 
pocket, for in 1919 the sugar crop yielded the 
Hawaiians the tidy sum of $88,000,000 and the 
pineapple one $23,000,000. Both of these ample 
mone5''-earners are 18-month crops. 



AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 17 

Hawaiian statistics tell a long story in brief 
compass. They reveal that t? two principal 
crops demonstrate a continuii .evelopment in- 
telligently directed, for again». the latest figures 
just given, pineapples in 1916 brought but 
$6,632,914, while in that same year the sugar 
crop only fetched fifty-four millions, and in 1910 
but forty-two. The Hawaiians have left no scien- 
tific stone unturned to improve those products. 
The best obtainable chemists are constantly at 
work upon problems of soil, drainage, plantings, 
etc. One of the results thereof is that their aver- 
age sugar cane yield per acre is over four tons 
(61/^ on irrigated land and 3V2 on non-irrigated) , 
while in Cuba it is only a little over two. And in 
Cuba land and labor are cheap, while in Hawaii 
both are dear. There should be a statue of King 
Kalakaua erected on every Hawaiian sugar plan- 
tation, for it was he who by his reciprocity treaty 
with the United States secm*ed such advantages 
for their sugar in our country as put that trade 
on a firm basis. Likewise his statue should be 
erected by us at Pearl Harbor, for that naval 
station was the price he paid for that treaty's 
trade advantages. Land unsuited for pineapple 
or sugar cane is being wisely developed for sisal, 
tobacco, coffee and bananas. The 1919 totals for 
the island's exports reduced by the amount they 



18 AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 

paid for their imports left them the tidy profit 
balance of forty-seven million dollars. A com- 
parison of their 1919 with the 1910 bank deposits 
gives illuminating testimony concerning their ad- 
vancing prosperity, for it shows an increase from 
thirteen to thirty-five miUions, included in which 
totals are the savings bank deposits of four and 
a quarter millions in 1910 against ten and a half 
millions in 1919. Of course, their trade is prin- 
cipally with our mainland ports, — over four- 
fifths of imports and 94 per cent of exports. The 
Hawaiian islands have proved a profitable invest- 
ment for our Government, which, spending upon 
them but five millions since annexation, has re- 
ceived in customs and internal revenue four times 
as much. They certainly deserve more generous 
treatment in the matter of public buildings and 
similar improvements. 

The Hawaiians themselves, living in the midst 
of this luxury of nature, are a people of simple 
tastes. They like fish and poi as a diet. Poi is 
made of flour from the root of the taro plant. 
It resembles a breakfast cereal, and is allowed to 
become slightly sour, but its consistency is most 
important. If it can be eaten with one finger 
it is too thick ; if three fingers are needed it is too 
thin; "two finger poi" is just right! Nowadays 
it is served in a cup, and eaten with a fork. It 



AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 19 

struck me that the preferences of the Hawaiians 
were along the lines of poi, papaya, pineapple 
and politics ; I grew to like them all. 

Speaking of fish recalls another of the color 
treats of these Isles of the Blest. Never, even in 
the imagination of the most advanced Futurist, 
were fish so gorgeously, so daringly colored and 
marked, and they are charmingly shown in the 
Waikiki Aquarium. The names of these fish are 
as picturesque as their coloring, but some of them 
are unwieldy, to say the least. Fancy a fish start- 
ing out in life handicapped with the family name 
of Humuhumunukunukuapual The natives 
have a legend that to punish a certain wicked 
god he was imprisoned under Diamond Head, 
that crouching fortress whose volcanic sides 
change hourly in color, and forced to paint the 
fish. If that be true he must have kept himself 
constantly intoxicated in order to have conceived 
the drunken dreams of color he portrays upon his 
fishy prey. 

Nor are the simsets like those seen anywhere 
else, for here they are generally of a delicious 
apricot shade, beautified by trade wind clouds, 
which during the day withdraw to the mountain 
tops, there to form gracefully rolling tablecloth 
effects, or to paint over the hillsides even finer 
cloud shadows than those of England. 



20 AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 

Of course, music flourishes in such surround- 
ings. Who has not heard the ukulele, that popu- 
lar pygmy of guitars! 

The only startlingly beautiful sight on the 
island of Oahu, where Honolulu and Pearl Har- 
bor are situated, is the sudden view from the 
Pali, and it is to other islands of the group 
one must go for such sights as the Grand Canyon 
on Kauai, the world's greatest active volcano on 
Hawaii, its largest extinct volcano and the sur- 
prising fern forests on Maui. On the "Big 
Island" (as Hawaii is familiarly called) the 
Kona district boasts a private climate all its own, 
thanks to which its coffee crop sold in 1919 for 
$1,105,910. This district is cut off from the 
trade winds by the lofty summits of Mauna 
Loa (13,675 feet high), Mauna Kea (13,825) 
and Hualalai (8,269). Deprived of that offset 
to the natural heat of the tropics, Kona would 
seem doomed to discomfort, but not at all ! It is 
rescued by one of the many wonders of this won- 
derful archipelago. Because the earth in this 
district, so exposed to unmitigated tropical heat, 
has a higher temperature than the ocean, sea 
breezes are caused which sweep across it and up 
its sheltering mountain slopes in order to estab- 
lish an equilibrium constantly disturbed by the 
land's heat. There results an agreeable climate. 



AT THE PACIFIC CROSSROADS 21 

quite private to Kona, which makes May to 
August there the wettest months and December 
to February the driest, although for all the neigh- 
boring islands December has the most rain and 
June the least. 

A frequent service of inter-island boats makes 
easy a visit to these and many other amazing 
sights, but the comforts and luxuries of a long 
stay are to be had on Oahu, in or near Honolulu, 
the capital, whose population both permanent 
and transient is constantly growing. 

When one has experienced the welcome that 
nestles in the Hawaiian word "Aloha," he falls 
a helpless victim to the charm of America's mid- 
Pacific paradise. What Hawaii means as the 
crossroads of the Pacific is known best to its own 
people, and it is now usefully expressing itself 
in their Pan-Pacific Union, to which all the other 
peoples around that great ocean are adhering. 
It promises to do as much for the increase of 
mutual understanding among them, with Hawaii 
for its "telephone central," as the Pan-American 
Union is doing for the republics of the western 
hemisphere. Go and sit down for a season at this 
crossroads, and you will hang about the walls 
of your memory such a series of pictures as will 
long after brighten your thought and refresh 
your spirit in times of need under less favoring 
skies. 



CHAPTER II 

SOME MENTAL GEOGEAPHY 

In our Foreword we pointed out that the 
United States is bounded on the south by the 
Monroe Doctrine, on the east by our opportunity 
to serve stricken Europe, on the north by the 
Anglo-Saxon racial tie, and on the west by the 
Japanese problem. You will say that this is men- 
tal, not physical geography,— well, and why not? 
He who does not realize that the physical is 
always under the control of the mental, will never 
understand the Far East. If we want to get at 
the spirit of the Pacific Ocean problem we must 
study its psychological factors. This means that 
we must reach beyond physical out into mental 
geography. 

The most outstanding feature of life around 
the Pacific is the natural beauty of the back- 
ground, there constantly meeting the eye. It 
is most fitting that Captain Cook's errand when 
first he explored many of those delightful shores 
was primarily to observe a transit of Venus. 
Venus, the queen of beautjr, she who was fabled 

22 



SOME MENTAL GEOGRAPHY 23 

to nave been born of ocean-spray, never more 
aptly justified her goddess traditions than in thus 
luring the white man out across those charming 
seas to even more charming lands. If we can but 
learn the lesson of beauty and harmony which 
these lovely lands have ages long mutely striven 
to teach, then America's western boundary, the 
Future of the Pacific, will never suffer the curse 
that the militarism of Prussia brought upon 
Europe. 

It is the spirit of the Pacific Ocean problem 
that we are chiefly seeking to explore, for, once 
understood, it will prove the key to open that 
long corridor of shut doors between ourselves and 
a better understanding of the Orient. But pre- 
paratory to that exploration it will be useful to 
readjust some common misapprehensions con- 
cerning the geography of that vast region be- 
cause the geographical environment of a people 
gives important indications as to its probable 
line of development. A change in a country's 
climate will sooner or later change its people. It 
does not follow that favorable geographical en- 
vironment will promptly change a race intro- 
duced therein, but a combination of a fine race 
plus a fine place inevitably produces national im- 
portance. Of course, we know that even during 
the historical era, the climate conditions of certain 



24> SOME MENTAL GEOGRAPHY 

regions have materially altered. The Egyptians, 
the Babylonians and the Ninevites, during the 
days of their surpassing greatness, lived in lands 
whose climate was far more favorable than it is 
to-day. This has been thoroughly studied by 
Ellsworth Huntington in his "Civilization and 
Climate," which contains interesting conclusions 
upon the climate enjoyed by those early world 
leaders, deduced from the thickness of the rings 
on the huge mariposa tree butts of California, 
checked by comparison with the saline deposits 
along the banks of the Caspian Sea and certain 
lakes. The logical outcome of his novel investi- 
gations is that the portions of the globe at present 
best suited for racial development are ( 1 ) west- 
ern Europe; (2) the northerly portion of eastern 
and central United States; (3) a strip along the 
California coast beginning north of San Fran- 
cisco and running south; (4) Japan; (5) New 
Zealand, Tasmania and the southerly seaboard 
of Australia. 

The Pacific Ocean problem is bound up in a 
consideration of numbers 3, 4 and 5, and here 
we have the necessary combination of a fine race 
plus a favoring place. Of these three the Japa- 
nese alone represent long residence, while the 
Californians, Australians and New Zealanders 
owe their present favoring geographical location 



SOME MENTAL GEOGRAPHY 25 

to racial enterprise, representing as they do the 
pioneering initiative of a progressive, home-leav- 
ing portion of an already strongly developed 
race. From this it is quite clear that the Pacific's 
future is going to be in the hands of no weak- 
lings, and that outsiders, from now on, will have 
small chance of successful intrusion. Foreigners 
may overrun and divide up the mainland of Asia, 
but no such fate is in store for the Japanese, the 
Anglo-Saxons in Australasia, nor their cousins 
across the way along the North American sea- 
coast. These strong peoples are sure to dominate 
their own ocean, but whichever of them attempts 
to follow the world-supremacy delusion of mili- 
taristic Germany will run up against the counter- 
checks provided by these doughty neighbors. 
This fact seems so clear, and so sure of recogni- 
tion by the strongly developed common sense of 
all those powerful nations as to insure future 
peace between them. 

Geographical environment undoubtedly influ- 
ences peoples for good or ill. Their mental as 
well as physical development is affected by their 
geography. The history of Great Britain and 
Japan shows how useful is the greater freedom 
for development enjoyed by an island race over 
dwellers on the mainland. The English Channel 
has many a time proved how much safer is a 



26 SOME MENTAL GEOGRAPHY 

water boundary than such a line on the map as 
that which separated Belgium and Germany, no 
matter how much the latter be buttressed by in- 
ternational agreements sometimes styled "scraps 
of paper." Although we Americans have spread 
across a continent, we have always enjoyed the 
same water-defended exclusiveness as islanders, 
and have therefore been allowed time to cut our 
teeth and go through the national diseases of 
childhood before being called upon to take our 
part in world politics. 

Now this fact of the advantages blessing an 
island race looms large in the study of the Pacific 
Ocean problem, for in its wealth of islands that 
body of water differs markedly from the Atlantic 
Ocean. It must also be noticed that the westerly 
side of the Pacific shows a totally different geo- 
graphical adjustment from its easterly side. No 
such difference is seen between the two sides of 
the Atlantic. There are practically no islands 
at all lying off the Pacific coast of North, Central 
or South America, certainly none of any impor- 
tance. The Galapagos, off Ecuador, and Juan 
Fernandez, off Chile, are mere islets. Cross the 
Pacific and you find quite a different state of 
affairs, and one which has a highly significant 
bearing upon our problem. There, lying well off 
from the mainland, runs north and south a long 



SOME mental; geography 27 

chain of island fortresses. These are either in- 
habited or controlled by races distinctly stronger 
than those behind them upon the continent of 
Asia. Unless we are grievously wrong in our 
conclusions those strong islanders on the west 
and Anglo-Saxon mainlanders on the east are 
going to grow even stronger, and the grip of the 
Japanese, the Australians, the Canadians and 
ourselves upon the watery highways connecting 
us will be tightened and not loosened. Outsiders 
will remain outsiders. If only v/e may be given 
the good sense to proceed peaceably, and disre- 
gard militaristic jingoes certain to work upon 
each of us from within I 

Keverting to the seclusive imiiiimity enjoyed 
by islanders, some captious critic may contend 
that Australia (as large as the United States) is 
really a continent and not an island, and that 
therefore Australians are not island folk. To 
this comes the ready response that those five 
million Britishers are as yet living only along 
their seacoast, having developed but sHghtly their 
back country, and that this proximity to and 
outlook upon the sea keeps them as truly an 
island race as are their cousins in the far off 
homeland. Clearly they have enjoyed the same 
lack of interruption to their national life from 
without as the British and ourselves, and dreaded 



28 SOME MENTAL GEOGRAPHY 

no foreign invasion such as constantly threatens 
countries upon the continent of Europe, or 
China, India and other Asian lands. 

Upon the easterly side of the Pacific, then, our 
geographies show mainland races fronting an 
ocean undefended hy islands. On the other side 
of the great expanse of waters, the approaches 
to a mainland teeming with Oriental populations 
are guarded by a protective chain of islands in- 
habited to the north and south by stronger races 
than those on the Asian continent, while in the 
centre, the originally weaker hnks of the chain 
are dominated by two white races, the Dutch and, 
in the Philippines, ourselves. The Japanese run 
all the way from the centre of Saghalien, .50'' 
north latitude, down to 22° north, where For- 
mosa ends, while the Australasian Anglo-Saxons 
run south from the equator, beginning with the 
islands lately taken from the Germans. The 
more easterly fringe of German islands, as far 
down as the equator, seem entrusted to the 
Japanese. The ethnological strength of those 
controlling all these barrier islands cannot be 
disregarded in any sensible consideration of the 
Philippines' future. 

We may remark in passing that Nature her- 
self has accentuated in an interesting manner the 
marked differences between the Asian continent 



SOME MENTAL GEOGRAPHY 29 

and the islands lying off it. She has drawn a line 
between those which she would allot to Asia, 
and those she considers as beyond. A study of 
the flora and fauna of the long chain of islands 
stretching out from Java and Sumatra into the 
Pacific reveals that this natural division falls be- 
tween the islands of Bali and Lombok and runs 
east of the Celebes and the PhiHppines, all to the 
east being Australasian and quite as different 
from those to the west as are the kangaroos of 
Australia from any Asian animal. The Celebes 
alone possess flora and fauna of both types. 

Availing itself of the geographical exclusive- 
ness lent by Nature, the labor party of Australia, 
determined to avoid competition with cheaper, 
imported labor, have insisted upon a ^Vhite Aus- 
tralia. Their position upon this question has 
exactly the same economic basis and reason as 
that of their cousins in Canada and friends in our 
Pacific Coast states in opposing Hindoo, Chinese 
or Japanese immigration, or of the Japanese 
themselves who exclude the cheaper-living Chi- 
nese and Koreans. The policy of a White Aus- 
tralia will retard the exploitation of her natural 
wealth, but, not only will it conserve racially un- 
diluted Australian manhood, but also, and for 
that reason, prove a strong factor in keeping their 
great ocean pacific for all mankind. 



30 SOME MENTAL GEOGRAPHY 

An incursion into mental geography causes us 
to notice that there is an interesting similarity 
between the Australian and New Zealander 
island race of to-day and the equally detached 
Americans of a century and a half ago. In so 
doing we observe how rapid modern communica- 
tions have modified what used to be geographical 
remoteness, for Australia is no further from Eng- 
land by steam than the American Colonies were 
by sail. We have changed, for our own people 
are no longer the mariners they were in the days 
when the Yankee clipper ships brought fortunes 
from the Far East home to the sea-viewing an- 
cestors of the present day New Englanders, 
whose business risks nowadays lie inland rather 
than across the waters. The fact that the bulk 
of Austrahan population is still but a seaboard 
fringe makes their present stage of development 
similar to the early days of our own countrj^ 
when we too were mostly a seaboard people. It 
does not seem a risky prediction that before Aus- 
tralia settles down to a really serious exploitation 
of the interior of her great continent, she will, 
in response to the national instinct of a seabor- 
dering race, complete her hold upon the island- 
sprinkled waters lying in her part of the world. 
It will be greatly to the advantage of the other 
English-speaking races to have her complete her 



SOME MENTAL GEOGRAPHY 31 

dominion over the inferior peoples of those parts, 
and it will likewise mean fair treatment for all 
of them, as witness the consideration to-day shown 
the Maoris in New Zealand, to quote but one of 
many benefits of Anglo-Saxon colonial tolera- 
tion. 

Americans must remember that while they are 
concerned primarily with matters of a continen- 
tal nature, the live questions lying across the 
Pacific take on that aspect which island races 
always confront. Geography and especially 
mental geography looms large in all that half 
of the world. 

The geographical story of the Pacific must not 
be left without pointing out one inconvenience 
which it sustains, namely, that it is surrounded by 
volcanoes, not quiet, well-behaved volcanoes like 
Vesuvius, but obstreperous ones. These petulant 
factors, apt to break out at any time without 
reasonable notice, and then, more harmful to 
others than to themselves, are strangely similar 
in their effects upon geography to that of mili- 
taristic jingoes upon a nation's policies. Vol- 
canoes are really safer because their outbreaks 
only produce local effects. It will be well if 
Pan-Pacific folk learn to counteract the effect of 
militaristic jingo upheavals or outbreaks as care- 



32 SOME MENTAL GEOGRAPHY 

fully as by their architecture they do that of their 
volcanoes ! 

Let us remind those who allege that the Pacific 
Ocean is too vast a tract to stage a world war, 
that even the 16-knot ships that now ply there, 
when compared with the speed of the Roman, 
Greek, Tyrian or Carthaginian galleys, reduce 
the size of the Pacific to that of the Mediter- 
ranean Sea during those centuries when it was 
the cockpit of international strife. Japan is now 
putting on large 19-knot steamers, and the Cana- 
dian-Pacific line will see that and raise it. 

It may be noticed that nothing has been said of 
South America's interest in the Pacific, but this 
can be answered in two ways. In the first place, 
take a map and drop a line due south from 
Boston; it will fall clear of most of South Amer- 
ica, which will he east of the fine, thrusting itself 
out into the Atlantic Ocean, and by so much 
evidencing its geographical backing away from 
the Pacific. Perhaps this is but a fair expression 
of South America's preference for matters Euro- 
pean, from which part of the world Argentina, 
its most progressive nation, is steadily drawing 
an immigration of half a milHon sturdy indi- 
viduals per year, half of them from northern 
Spain and half from northern Italy. But this 
geographical withdrawal of South America is 



SOME MENTAL GEOGRAPHY 33 

not the only reason for failure to accentuate her 
relations to the Pacific. Her two largest, richest 
and most powerful countries, Argentina and 
Brazil, face toward the Atlantic mentally as well 
as geographically, and not the Pacific. It is true 
that Chile is also a strong country, but it has only 
a population of three and a quarter millions, re- 
ceives practically no immigration, has not in- 
creased in population for the last 20 years, and 
shows no probabihty of doing so. The republics 
of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are not of a 
type to provide any active or aggressive partici- 
pation in international adjustments; neither 
their race nor their place is favorable thereto. 
The only possibility of South America taking an 
active part in matters pan-Pacific would be if 
there should come about a union of Argentina 
with Chile, to which combination Uruguay, 
speaking the same language, might usefully ad- 
here. In such a union the Chileans, a vigorous 
race of political leaders, would probably play as 
j)rominent a part as Ohio or Virginia, those 
birthplaces of Presidents and other lesser office- 
holders are alleged to have played in our country. 
This would mean that this j oint southerly repub- 
lic, erected in the temperate zone of South 
America, would benefit from Chile's knowledge 
of the Pacific to use their united strength in 



S4j some mental geography 

that direction. Strong races located in temperate 
and favorable zones may never safely be disre- 
garded in considering future international possi- 
bilities. If and when this favorable combination 
of the best of the south Latin races takes place 
in a great grain producing territory, then the 
mental geography of the Pacific, now dominated 
by the brains of Anglo-Saxons and Japanese, 
will be enriched and broadened by the participa- 
tion of the Latin mind, so potent in Europe. 



CHAPTER III 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 



Japan is reached by a long journey across a 
vast ocean, and that approach allows time for 
the consideration of what ocean navigation can 
mean to a people intelligently disposed to avail 
itself to the utmost of those world highways to 
power and prosperity. 

Out in the Pacific Ocean, alongside the Asiatic 
Coast, lie the British Isles of the East, Japan. 
In 1633 and 1635, the Tokugawa Shogun then 
ruling the country, fearing the effect of foreign- 
ers within, and of Japanese travel outside the 
home islands, issued edicts excluding the out- 
landers and killing ocean navigation for the Japa- 
nese by limiting their vessels to fifty tons, or, in 
other words, to fishing boats. It was a drastic 
move, but it gained for the country the seclusion 
her ruler sought. For 222 years this isolation of 
the Japanese continued uninterrupted until 1853. 
Then began an amazing fairy story, the tale of 
a new-born merchant marine. In that year two 
momentous events took place, the invasion of 

35 



36 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

this long undisturbed seclusion by Commodore 
Perry and the American fleet, and another Toku- 
gawa Shogun (the last of those usiu-pers of im- 
perial power) rescinded the ancient edicts, not 
only reopening the seas to those hardy islanders 
after two centuries of banishment therefrom, but 
also encouraging purchase of foreign built ships 
suited for long voyages. 

Japan, no longer compelled to turn her eyes in- 
ward, looked abroad, and took thought how best 
to reach forth into the great world outside. The 
problem was bewildering for a folk who, for 
generation after generation, had lived so entirely 
apart. Something new was needed to enable 
these hermits to reach the mainland, to reach 
other and more distant mainlands, to learn once 
more the long forgotten waterways of her vast 
home ocean. They decided that this something 
new must be a Bridge of Boats, and starting 
energetically to build it, their modern merchant 
marine grew apace. The most fairjdike portion 
of this amazing fairy tale is the tonnage to-day 
reached by a shipping starting only 66 years 
ago with no training or traditions — absolutely 
nothing to build upon. Their consistent policy 
of governmental assistance has emulated the sa- 
gacity of the Tokuwaga rescinder of the ancient 
edicts who, not satisfied with opening the door 



^ A BRIDGE OF BOATS 37 

to ocean navigation, at the same time encouraged 
shipbuilding at home and shipbuying abroad. 
He wanted prompt results, and that desire, ever 
since actuating Japanese ship-subsidies, has 
gained for her a fleet that is the wonder of the 
world. A friendly foreigner can speak more 
freely on this subject than can a Japanese, for 
the latter would be dismissed for a braggart be- 
fore he had half finished his story. 

To obtain a realizing sense of its surprising 
growth, based as it was upon no traditions or 
training whatever, compare it with Japan's suc- 
cess in modern warfare. Her defeat of the 
Chinese in 1895 and the Russians in 1905 is gen- 
erally discounted by Occidental critics as being 
but the natural result when a nation long trained 
in arms and proud of their fighting men meets 
another nation which for centuries despised and 
neglected the profession of arms, and still an- 
other one which was nationally inefiScient and 
unprepared. Please notice that even her critics 
recognized that Japan had always set such store 
by military training that she entered her modern 
conflicts equipped with fine traditions and techni- 
cal preparation. But her even greater successes 
in the peaceful field of ocean navigation, from 
what did that start? Her merchant marine had 
enjoyed no such training in seamanship as had 



38 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

her fighting men for war, but, instead, had suf- 
fered banishment from the high seas during gen- 
eration after generation until the long interdict 
of 222 years was concluded. Can the fiction of 
any fairy story rival this fact of only 66 years' 
growth? 

This Bridge of Boats serves a great national 
purpose, one that affords a valuable lesson to 
such an ingrowing people as Americans were be- 
fore the war forced our attention outward. This 
Bridge carries Japan's varied products over to 
more and more foreign markets, and brings back 
the wherewithal for the betterment of those at 
home. Over it pass outward her many products, 
travelling upon vessels whose freight payments 
(an enormous item) remain in home pockets. 
Back over it comes the foreigner's purchase 
money for Japanese goods, and his supplies of 
raw materials needed in Japan, plus his freight- 
money for their transportation. One of her three 
greatest shipping companies, the Nippon Yusen 
Kaisha, paid in November, 191 9, a dividend for 
the preceding six months of 100% on its stock. 
Not only do the various earnings just described 
pay back many times over the tax money needed 
for the upbuilding ship-subsidies, but also, and 
much more important, they furnish employment 
to more workers at home, not only in manuf actur- 



i A BRIDGE OF BOATS 3» 

ing goods for export, but also for those who 
"go down to the sea in ships" in constantly in- 
creasing numbers. 

So intelligently has the Japanese system of 
ship-subsidies been worked out, that it, plus the 
enterprise and hardy adventuring so characteris- 
tic of that island race, have given her a merchant 
marine only surpassed by that of England and 
the United States. The latest available statistics, 
(November, 1919) show that Japan has 2,803 
steamers, of which 690 are over a thousand tons 
burden, and these latter large ones have a total 
gross tonnage of 2,154?,4i83, to which the smaller 
ones add over a million tons more. The normal 
growth of Japanese shipping, which amounted 
to about 60,000 tons annually before 1919, was 
given a sudden impetus by the withdrawal from 
ocean navigation of most of the merchantmen of 
the Allied Powers during the war. The Japa- 
nese naturally seized upon this golden opportu- 
nity, and the demand for new ships grew so great 
that she built over 700,000 tons burden during 
the year 1918. Baron Rempei Kondo, the pro- 
gressive president of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha, 
points out that although hitherto the great arter- 
ies of Japanese shipping have been the American, 
the European and the Australian runs, now, to 
employ the nimierous new bottoms as well as to 



40 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

meet the reopened competition with foreigners, 
new lines must be fostered. That step the gov- 
ernment is taking, and, by subsidies, helping 
especially to push the South American and South 
African lines and generally those trading into 
the South Seas. Not only does this greatly ex- 
tend their Bridge of Boats, but also it opens new 
markets to their factories. 

Before the war the "Shagaisen," or vessels 
other than those of the three great companies, the 
Toyo Kisen Kaisha, the Nippon Yusen Kaisha, 
and the Osaka Shosen Kaisha, kept to the home 
coasting trade or to nearby China ports, except 
in the case of a few more venturesome tramp 
steamers. Of late, however, these "Shagaisen" 
have launched out and trade to all parts of the 
world, operating for this larger purpose a gross 
tonnage exceeding a million. Of course, many 
of these new lines cannot be expected to paj^ 
when first established, but the Japanese are meet- 
ing this difficulty just as they have met previous 
ones too large for individual enterprise — -by fi- 
nancial aid from the government. To a student 
of mercantile economics it is interesting to note 
that they are as successful in their system of gov- 
ernmental assistance to privately owned and 
operated enterprises, as they are not when they 
combine government ownership with government 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 41 

operation. The explanation is not far to seek — 
the former enjoys what the latter lacks, i.e., the 
all-important incentive of individual enterprise, 
and freedom from political appointees or political 
hour-and-rate control. 

Perhaps, in passing, it will be permitted to a 
friendly foreigner to talse up the cudgels on 
behalf of Japan in regard to a couple of strictui-es 
upon her methods of business. There are two 
comments of a critical character which most 
travellers make after investigating Japanese 
commercial methods. Both deserve explanation, 
and as complementary to that explanation there 
should be added another general comment which 
ought to be made but never is. The first concerns 
the alleged practice of employing Chinese cash- 
iers or compradors, and the second, the diverg- 
ence from sample of goods delivered on order by 
Japanese exporters. The comment which is not 
made but should be, concerns their limited equip- 
ment of modern machinery and commercial appli- 
ances, including motor cars, telephones, etc., 
notwithstanding which, Japan has made her 
remarkable industrial advance. 

Let us take an honest, open-minded look at 
the Chinese comprador custom, so often used 
by critics as an admission by the Japanese that 
they do not dare trust their own people when 



42 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

it comes to handling cash. In the first place, 
very few of these Chinese are actually so 
employed, and in the second place this inter- 
pretation of the practice is unfair and incom- 
plete. The fact is that the Japanese are not 
good at figures. It takes some time to realize 
this, but you come to it at last. They have 
excellent brains, but lack precision and con- 
centration, so absolutely necessary when dealing 
with figures. Among numerous instances of this 
which recur to the memory, take the following 
as fair examples. The manager of the Tokyo 
office of a large steamship company, after stating 
that a servant's ticket cost two-thirds of the 
regular first-class fare, broke down completely 
when he tried to figure out that amount, and 
ended by frankly asking "how do you get two- 
thirds of a number?" I took this to mean that 
he was temporarily embarrassed by the absence of 
his abacus or counting board, so universally used 
for calculation in the Far East, but later the 
ticket-seller at the Miyajima railway station, 
even with his abacus, made such a mess of figur- 
ing four and a half fares to Shimonoseki that the 
hotel porter had to help him out. A shopman in 
Nikko named a price on a certain lot of antiqui- 
ties after spending some minutes over the prob- 
lem with his abacus, only to be corrected in his 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 43 

addition later by his employer, who thereby ma- 
terially reduced the price. Try to draw money 
on a letter of credit at any Japanese bank and 
see what happens, and how long it takes you 
to get the funds. An American, invited to ac- 
cept (which he later did) the presidency of a 
fifty million yen ($25,000,000) corporation with 
half Japanese and half American capital, told me 
in Tokyo that one of his conditions had been that 
American bookkeeping methods and bookkeepers 
be employed, because the Japanese were so poor 
at figures, and not because he doubted their 
integrity. An American teacher, after eight 
years' experience in teaching Japanese youth, 
reports that although they showed a surprising 
ability to memorize dates or statistics of any sort, 
they were strangely unable to unravel the ordi- 
nary mathematical problems easily handled by 
the average American of similar age. The mat- 
ter of Japanese honesty is in nowise involved in 
the Chinese comprador practice, for all who have 
travelled in Europe will be agreeably surprised 
by the honesty of Japanese servants and hotel 
people. After four months there and never once 
locking our hotel rooms, we not only lost nothing, 
but were twice bothered by having articles not 
our own put into our luggage. Indeed, no- 
where will the traveller experience such honesty 



44 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

and desire to please from all with whom he 
comes in contact as in Japan. 

The Chinaman, on the other hand, seems to 
come naturally hy his skill at figures. Some of 
them are almost uncanny in the rapidity with 
which they will work out the most intricate prob- 
lem of accounts. This is particularly noticeable 
in those dealing with foreign exchange. The Chi- 
nese are as skillful with figures as the Japanese 
are slow, and this rather uncomplimentary ex- 
planation is all that is needed to dispel the Chi- 
nese comprador bogey of the anti-Japanese 
critic. Lastly, we refer this same critic to a new 
comprador story which he will find in our chapter 
on China. 

And now for the divergence-from-sample crit- 
icism, which is unfortunately a "true bill," and 
one freely criticized by the Japanese press and 
chambers of commerce. So honest is the average 
Japanese that it makes one reluctant to say of 
this fact "shortsighted unscrupulousness of cer- 
tain exporters," and then change the subject to 
one more pleasant. A frank facing of the situa- 
tion, followed by an investigation of their manu- 
facturing methods, may help to clear up some of 
the sources of these regrettable divergencies. In 
the first place, one notes that Japan, dotted 
everywhere with mountains, is a paradise of water 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 45 

power, a fact which American capitalists are 
beginning to recognize, as is evidenced by the 
recent embarkation of $10,000,000 by one Ameri- 
can corporation in Japanese water-power plants, 
on a fifty-fifty basis with the local people. 
The value of this cheap form of power has long 
been understood in those islands, where, for gen- 
erations before its larger possibiHties were 
grasped, it had been used in many small ways. 
For example, junks with water-wheels attached 
are anchored in the streams whose current, oper- 
ating the wheels, provides cheap power to grind 
rice from the neighboring fields. Even the poor 
man's house has electric light, for a ten-candle- 
power light costs but four cents per night. In 
many villages the people enjoy free electric light- 
ing in their houses because the streams that gen- 
erate the power are the common property of the 
community. Most toyshops sell cheap water- 
wheels with pipes and tiny rice-mill complete, so 
that children early learn the mechanics of water 
power. One sees hillside villages through which 
a rivulet, brought in at the top, turns a series of 
waterwheels all the way down the village street, 
giving power for a dozen or more small indus- 
tries conducted by workmen in their own homes. 
A natural result of this was the development and 
spread of what the English call "cottage indus- 



46 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

tries" as contradistinguished from factories, of 
which latter, speaking comparatively, there are 
but few thus far in Japan. This "cottage indus- 
try" system doubtless makes for better living 
conditions among those employed therein than is 
possible in the average factory community, but 
it has its commercial di-awbacks. Articles manu- 
factured in the workmen's homes, be they pot- 
tery, cutlery, toys or what not, can never be so 
exactly alike as those turned out from a factory. 
To the merchant this means that the goods he 
ordered from the manufacturer will not run so 
true to sample if from a "cottage industry" source 
as from a factory. As a result the merchant be- 
comes accustomed to this divergence from sample 
and grows careless in the same regard with his 
customers. Perhaps we have here at least a 
partial explanation for the evil we are investi- 
gating. The laxity some Japanese exporters dis- 
play in letting theii' deliveries differ from samples 
used by their agents when soliciting orders is 
proving so hurtful to their export trade that 
certain of their leading chambers of commerce 
and newspapers have indulged in plain speech, 
demanding reforms. "Get-rich-quick" methods 
are proving as fallacious there as in ours, or any 
other country, and they themselves have waked 
up to it, and are quite frank on the subject. 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 47 

There has lately been considerable public dis- 
cussion in Tokyo and Yokohama concerning the 
falling off which this unfortunate practice has 
caused in the large match trade which Japanese 
manufacturers captured when German and other 
European supplies were cut off by the war. 
Speaking of matches, it is both interesting and 
significant that the Japanese match men are plan- 
ning to combine and then enlist American capital, 
thus also securing the latest American improve- 
ments in machinery. A similar action is being 
taken by some Tokyo toy manufacturers. Does 
this not suggest a useful manner of pushing 
American trade in the Orient? Buying into a 
successful "going concern" with established 
markets for its wares, and then cheapening and 
bettering the product is surely a shorter and 
more certain road to foreign markets than a 
haphazard invasion with illy prepared agents, 
as some American firms are doing. Japan has 
been placed near the Asian markets by the "act 
of God," but needs our capital for their large 
development just as much as we need her knowl- 
edge of those markets and influence therein. 

And now for one general observation which 
foreign investigators of Japanese commercial 
progress ought to make but do not — ^that of how 
little their amazing progress has been aided by 



48 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

the use of modern mechanical appliances and 
machinery. Modern industrial methods are 
needed there more than is suspected by the aver- 
age foreigner impressed by Japan's success in 
warfare and shipbuilding. He will be surprised 
to learn that although the use of electric light is 
general because abundant water-power makes it 
cheap, there are few telephones, and as for motor 
cars, so necessary to us that they are no longer 
classed as luxuries even by the small farmer, 
there are but 3600 in Tokyo to a population of 
over two million, but 250 in Kyoto for over four 
hundred thousand people, and the same limited 
number for the three hundred thousand of such a 
cosmopolitan, up-to-date seaport as Yokohama, 
the greatest in Japan. The present character 
of the rice-fields precludes the employment of 
agricultural machinery, used so little there in any 
branch of agriculture, although the country is 
so peculiarly dependent upon the product of its 
soil. These things are coming, but they are do- 
ing so but slowly, and they have a long way to 
come before reaching the Occidental level. Their 
telephones and telegraphs, all owned and oper- 
ated by the government, are no more efficient than 
this experiment has proved in ours or any other 
country. These comments are not made to crit- 
icize the Japanese for being backward, but to 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 49 

point out that she has thus far made her wonder- 
ful industrial advance without the valuable as- 
sistance other nations are drawing from motors 
plus agricultural and other machinery. When 
she equips her hard-working and cheap man- 
power with the manifolding arm of sufficient 
modern machinery it is difficult to predict the 
strides she will make. And she is getting ready 
to do this very thing — make no mistake about it ! 
A consideration of the Bridge of Boats con- 
structed by the Japanese has particular value for 
Americans for two reasons. The first is that it 
proves the results thus obtainable for our factory- 
invested capital and even more for American 
labor, since by increasing the foreign market for 
the former's products it thereby broadens the de- 
mand for workmen, and a rising demand means 
a rising wage. Nothing is more important to 
the future of our great republic than continued 
and increasing employment for our labor at such 
a rate as will gradually elevate their standard of 
living. It is a great blessing that we all work in 
America, and therefore, how to raise the level 
of our workmen both in his work and in his 
home is the most vital problem to which our 
statesmen can turn their attention. The Japa- 
nese realize this, and in their Bridge of Boats 
they have worked out a fine all around plan for 



50 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

achieving the desired result in a manner benefit- 
ing a maximum of their citizenship at home or 
afloat, working with hands in the shops or ships, 
or with brains in directing them. We cannot do 
better than to go and do likewise. 

The second reason why it is highly desirable 
for us to know of the Bridge of Boats and of the 
prosperity it brings to Japan is because this 
knowledge will clear up much misunderstanding 
by our people of Japan's purposes and what she 
is going to do next. Clearly, she is at one of 
those great parting of the ways, one of those 
Crossroads of Destiny to which all nations come 
in the course of their development. Which way 
is she heading? To paraphrase a popular song, 
"We don't know where she's going, but she's on 
her way." She certainly is "on her way," and 
that, too, with all sails set. Many Japanese 
leaders of political thought, realizing her great 
strides as an exporting nation with unlimited 
cheap water and man power, frown upon the 
military party urging reliance upon the army and 
navy alone to advance her prosperity and pres- 
tige. The former see the desired goal more 
safely reached through increasing the nation's 
wealth, thereby bettering living conditions, and 
thus making hers a greater people. And their 
strongest argument is what her Bridge of Boats 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 51 

has done and will do for Japan. Nor do they 
wish to risk the destruction of that bridge. 

The military folk say "we need more territory 
for our overcrowded population increasing at the 
rate of 700,000 per year. See what we gained 
for you in the Chinese and the Russian wars; 
we will do even greater things if a freer hand be 
given us." Which leaders will the sagacious 
Japanese follow? Let us try to look at the 
problem through their eyes, which means that we 
must give fair consideration to both the pathways 
now open to them. 

All Occidentals know of the achievements of 
Japanese arms during the last twenty-five years, 
and of the territorial gain to their Empire which 
resulted therefrom. Korea, the size of the British 
Isles, has been definitely incorporated into the 
Empire and so has the large island of Formosa 
and the southerly half of Sakhalien, while the 
leasehold upon Manchuria is an even more im- 
portant and valuable prize. Because of this 
knowledge it is but natural that foreigners jump 
to the conclusion that Japan is not only ready 
for war at any moment, but is actually spoiling 
for it. But would those Occidentals reach that 
conclusion if they knew as much about Japan's 
recent victories of peace, and chief among them 
her Bridge of Boats? We venture to think not! 



52 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

One cannot intelligently discuss the problem of 
the Far East by treating of Japan on land alone, 
and without consideration of how her amazing 
commercial successes upon and across the high 
seas influence her toward peace; her merchant 
fleets would disappear as has Germany's should 
she fail in war, and her people know it. 

On the other hand, it is well to be entirely frank 
concerning the strength of her mihtary party, 
which opposes acceptance of a peaceful evolution 
through increasing commercial relations with the 
outside world. It is headed by tirelessly active 
leaders as sagacious in peace as they have proved 
themselves in war. Through their efforts the 
schoolchildren, those masters of to-morrow, are 
everywhere given military drill, even girls and 
boys in primary schools. Almost every temple 
possesses a striking military trophy of cannon 
taken from the Russians. Terauchi did this, and 
it was generally approved except by a few old- 
fashioned folk who grumbled that for centuries 
the only warlike trophies permitted in Buddhist 
temples had been imitation and not real weapons. 
The fighting man has always enjoyed great pres- 
tige in Japan, and it is only natural that this fact 
should be exploited along political lines by mili- 
tary politicians. The acquisition of Formosa, 
of Manchuria, of Korea flattered the national 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 53 

pride, just as it would have done that of any 
other people, and, of course, this strengthened 
the prestige of the military party. Popularity 
of the right to wear uniform has been employed 
here just as it was in Germany. Government 
employees, and they are legion, wear uniforms. 
Primary school boys all wear military caps, while 
middle school, high school and university students 
have neat dark blue uniforms with metal buttons, 
though the university men add an academic touch 
by having their military caps slightly squared at 
the top — a sort of martial cousin to the "mortar 
board" headgear of Anglo-Saxon collegians. 

Then, too, the military party enjoys the sup- 
port of the yellow press (in this regard Japan 
is quite up to date ! ) , which is to-day protesting 
stoutly against any reduction in the force of 
60,000 men which their military authorities sent 
into Siberia when the British and ourselves, ad- 
hering to the agreement, sent only 7,000 men 
apiece. Furthermore, those same papers hint at 
a permanence of their forces there, on the ground 
of Siberia's adjoining Manchuria. The Tolcyo 
newspapers announced that on !N"ovember 26, 
1919, the Japanese Diplomatic Advisory Coun- 
cil recommended that no additional forces be sent 
to Siberia as requested by the War Department. 
Two days later the same papers reported that 



54. A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

General Tanaka, the War Minister, had never- 
theless decided it was necessary to send them, 
and the evening and night of the following day, 
on my way to Shimonoseki from Korea, I wit- 
nessed the departure of five transports loaded 
with troops. This episode seems to indicate that 
the War Department has the final say in such 
matters. 

Another light upon the military party's plans 
comes from a speech made in October, 1919, by 
a leading Australian labor orator. He urged 
that Australia do not accept the mandate for the 
German islands south of the equator, because 
that carried with it an approval of Japan's re- 
taining the German Caroline and Marshall 
islands north of that line. He argued that they 
were shipping to those islands many airplanes 
and much concrete, which, he opined, were not 
for agricultural purposes! The Japanese mili- 
tarists know that those islands lie athwart our 
lines of communication from Hawaii to the Phil- 
ippines ; they know that at the end of the Spanish 
war we offered Spain one million dollars for the 
Caroline Islands but she refused it; they know 
that in Jaluit, on one of the Marshall Islands, 
they have a strong naval base 1400 miles nearer 
to Hawaii (and therefore nearer to Cahfornia) 
than their navy formerly enjoyed, and they know 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 55 

the effect that these facts must have upon Amer- 
ica's opinion of Japan's policy in the Pacific. 
They know all this, and — they don't care what 
we may be thinking on the subject, for our 
friendship or commercial cooperation interests 
them not at all ! They do not feel, as do outsiders, 
that a choice by any nation of the path marked 
out by such as they, inevitably leads down 
through increasing international distrust to loss 
of credit (commercial and otherwise) abroad, 
and finally to the end which Prussia reached — a 
swamp engulfing for more than a generation all 
national ambitions, proper and improper alike. 
Just here it should be remarked that although we 
all recognize what Germany has lost in men, ma- 
terial, indemnity requirements, and sapping of 
national vitality by death of the physically fittest, 
not yet do either we or they realize what her loss 
of world credit means and will mean. Six- 
sevenths of the world's business is done with 
credit, and only one-seventh with cash. Ger- 
many is short of cash, but she will find that she 
is equally short of credit. Her army's treatment 
of Belgium and northern France will prove to 
have been bad business, in the strictest sense of 
the word. Germany has demonstrated the re- 
ductio ad absurdum of militaristic policies, just 
as Russia has proved that the world can be made 



56 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

too free for democracy. A democracy of the 
present Russian type is as dangerous in its 
freedom from restraint as was the Prussian 
army clique. Bolshevik demagogues and Ger- 
man Junkers come to the same in the end. 

Japanese advocates of territorial expansion by 
force of arms always include in their popular 
inducements the bait of an enhanced influence in 
and about the Pacific, their home ocean. But 
there are many of their fellow-citizens, influential 
men, who, having seen Germany lose her Pacific 
islands and Alsace-Lorraine, understand that 
taking does not always mean keeping. Further- 
more, these wise heads realize that it is unwise 
to risk losing their carefully built up Bridge of 
Boats, which can acquire for them something far 
more important to their future than a few islands 
or square miles of alien territory, viz., increasing 
market outlets so incessantly demanded by the 
mounting production of their national industries. 
These trained business minds, counselling to- 
gether in the powerful Chamber of Commerce 
at Tokyo, Yokohama and other centres regret 
that, although in 1905 during their Russian war, 
American sympathy everywhere favored Japan, 
and our pockets were open to her loans, all that 
is now changed. Who changed it if not the ad- 
vancing policies of their military party ? Perhaps 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 5T 

an X-ray instrument put upon the brains (and 
fine brains, too!) at the centre of their army and 
navy factions might reveal some fuller answer 
than outsiders can guess — especially if operated 
on the head of the overreaching blunderers 
who served the outrageous twenty-one demands 
(or more properly, five groups of demands) on 
China in January, 1915. 

Notwithstanding the military party's influence 
in the conduct of the Japanese Government I do 
not beheve they will succeed in leading down the 
Prussian pathway a shrewd people imbued with 
long traditions of frugality, decency and practi' 
cal thinking, — of love for ancestors practised in 
loving care of children, — of industry and aesthetic 
tastes nowhere and never surpassed. And why 
do I thus conclude after but four months' study 
of conditions in different parts of the Island 
Empire? It is because I thus learned at first 
hand of the effects at home as well as on the 
seas and abroad, of their far-reaching Bridge of 
Boats. To risk losing that bridge to national 
prosperity and progress would be folly. Over 
that structure of peace lies their surest and 
quickest path to increasing power among the 
nations of the earth, and a growing proportion 
of those sturdy islanders know it. 

The question, then, which really confronts the 



58 A BRIDGE OF BOATS 

investigator is, will or will not those among them 
who value the friendship of Americans and 
what that friendship means of capital and mar- 
kets, be able to restrain their military parti- 
sans? — and, secondly, can they swing their 
public opinion and next their leaders to their 
new and broader international viewpoint? We 
have agreed that they are at the crossroads of 
their national destiny — will they step out in 
the direction of disregarding others' points of 
view as in the short-sighted military dispensa- 
tion in Korea lately changed, and the clumsy 
handling of the Shantung opportunity, for 
both of which the mihtary party is to blame, 
and, most significant of all, retain the Pacific 
islands athwart our line to the Philippines? Or 
will they turn to the right, and by regaining the 
public support they enjoyed in 1905 throughout 
America, the world's richest nation, win on to 
increasing greatness hand in hand with the re- 
sources of our great republic instead of in spite 
of us? France had to make this same choice con- 
cerning England after her Fashoda incident. 
She decided to check her military party's "policy 
of pin-pricks" as it was then called, and con- 
fine her territorial expansion within reasonable 
limits. The result of her choice in that crisis 
was then supposed to concern none but herself 



A BRIDGE OF BOATS 59 

and England. We now know that it made pos- 
sible an Anglo-French friendship which under 
the skillful diplomacy of that very great English 
King, Edward VII, blossomed into the Anglo- 
French Entente which in 1914, '15, and '16 saved 
European civihzation from the Huns. 

The question of which pathway to increasing 
greatness the Japanese choose is not only of vital 
importance to them, but also it deeply concerns 
the other great powers, and especially ourselves 
and Great Britain, with our important interests 
in and about the Pacific Ocean. This choice of 
route to a lofty goal is one which must be decided 
by the Japanese people themselves. Those of us 
foreigners who admire the ancient spirit of that 
land can only look on and hope that the choice 
of the modern incarnation of that spirit will ac- 
cord with what we believe to be the strength of 
its roots in the past. Our belief that the military 
party will not succeed in leading it down the 
Prussian pathway has its strongest support in 
the Bridge of Boats. 



CHAPTER IV 

LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

Heee we are, steaming up the deep bay on 
whose westerly shores Perry landed, and beyond 
his landing place on the left rises Yokohama, 
and further still, where shallow water protects it, 
Tokyo. How shall we see this charming country 
together ? — all its fascinating sights — its national 
development so distinctive and special in every 
detail — its people who act and think along Orien- 
tal lines, and express their thoughts in a fashion 
differing more widely from ours than at first one 
reahzes. So kaleidoscopic is the impression it all 
makes upon the newly arrived Occidental that 
any attempt to give a coherently continued de- 
scription must prove futile. Perhaps our best 
course will be to put into your hands some ran- 
dom pencil sketches of what struck us as novel 
and interesting, and with them give you the ad- 
vice not to spend much time at first in modernized 
Yokohama or Tokyo, but to get on without delay 
to such places as Kyoto or Nikko or Nara, which 
are the Japan you have come so far to see. After 

60 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 61 

that, a little later on, come back to the great 
capital and its nearby seaport with mind and eye 
enlightened upon things Japanese and therefore 
more indulgent to the modern Japan, which, 
frankly, is not especially engaging. After you 
have glanced through these pencil notes, and 
after we have seen certain ancient gardens, and 
gone on some pilgrimages together, then we will 
venture sundry conclusions concerning the na- 
tional expressions or policies of this people into 
whose daily life we have been looking. 

International policies are but external prod- 
ucts of the internal development of a people, and 
cannot properly be understood by foreigners un- 
willing or unable to learn of that internal devel- 
opment which reveals itself in the nation's daily 
life. This is particularly a land that one must 
see for himself, for there await him surprises 
everywhere, and every day, — around every cor- 
ner; — no land contains so many for even the 
blase foreign traveller as Japan! Nor does 
reading in advance of descriptive travel books 
prepare one for them, so varied are they, and 
beyond the intake of any one book-writing mind. 
Here follow random notes upon a few of the 
surprises that struck this particular writer. 

Newspaper Reporters. — The boasted enter- 
prise of New York or Chicago reporters, espe- 



62 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

cially as exhibited in the interviewing of helpless 
foreigners reaching our Land of Freedom, has 
nothing which Tokyo or Yokohama cannot equal 
for those arriving at the latter. I was honored 
by intimate inquisitorial contact with gentlemen 
representing no less than seven journals of those 
two cities, and their vigorous methods put both 
the Holy Inquisition and a stomach-pump equal- 
ly to shame. And their photographers! they 
practise their art (or assaults, if you prefer it) 
in such smilingly ruthless fashion that one really 
cannot indulge in the justifiable homicide which 
should be their lot. When a friend was welcom- 
ing me in the Imperial Hotel at Tokyo, one of 
these camera bandits actually rested his weapon 
on the shoulder of the said friend, exploded a 
flashlight, and then instantly offered his official 
card with so guileless and engaging a smile as 
completely to disarm the victim. The insistence 
of the interviewers, as well as their voluminous 
interrogations have, however, compensation in 
the fact that they publish what you say, instead 
of what you don't, as has been known to happen 
upon (shall we say) rare occasions at home! 

Bare Heads. — Perhaps the skulls of the Japa- 
nese are thicker than ours, or else from babyhood 
they have been accustomed to having their heads 
uncovered, — anyhow they seem not to notice the 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 63 

cold of winter any more than the summer's sun, 
for they are naturally a hatless race. The peaked 
straw hats of the coolies are not hats at all, — 
they are little roofs that rest only upon the ex- 
treme top of the skull, and require a band under 
the chin, or around each ear, to keep them on. 
The women never wear any hats, for their coiffure 
is too elaborate and too much a source of pride 
to undergo even temporary eclipse under any 
sort of headgear. You will see coolies with a 
strip of white cotton tied about their heads so 
that they seem to be wearing low turbans, but 
they aren't — it is only a bandage around the 
brows and back of the head, leaving the top of 
it bare. Men and boys wear their hair either 
closely cropped or entirely shaved off. Of late 
years the soft felt hat of the Occident has come 
in with European clothes, but almost never our 
hard derby hat. The silk hat accompanies the 
frock coat of ceremony, to which garment they 
still cling notwithstanding its demise elsewhere. 
Schoolboys and university students are allowed 
to wear a uniform cap when in public which, of 
course, is a proud privilege, but otherwise — bare 
heads. We arrived in Yokohama a rainy day in 
September — bare heads everywhere! We sailed 
from Yokohama a bleak morning late in Decem- 
ber, with a cold wind blowing in from the sea, but 



64i LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

of all the Japanese crowding the pier to say 
"Sayonara" to their friends, only a very few pos- 
sessed hats, so bare heads was our first and last 
impression of that sturdy race. 

Dress of a Sturdy Race. — Nor are bare heads 
for young and old the only indications of the 
sturdiness that blesses these rugged islanders. 
Bare legs and scant clothing, regardless of rain 
or cold, are everywhere to be seen. If they are 
not born tough, it must toughen them! Japan, 
like England, is a rainy country, and especially 
so when one gets up into the hills. At Nikko it 
rains an unfair proportion of the time, and cold 
rain too, but nevertheless the men and boys went 
about with bare legs and hght cotton garments, 
and the women's clothes would have seemed un- 
healthily thin were it not for the protection given 
by the broad obi tied around the body. So light 
and airy seems the national costume that when 
you see a Japanese man in European dress he 
looks unduly muffled up! Although the men 
frequently wear foreign attire, the women never 
do, except when it is required, as for court ladies 
at official functions. It is more than well that 
they thus cling to their national costume, whose 
long graceful lines suits their dainty build ad- 
mirably, while they always look strange in our 
style of dress, which suits them not at all. A 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 65 

Japanese man of large affairs told me that he 
wore western clothes when at work, for they were 
more practical and better suited for that purpose 
than his native clothing, but that when office 
hours were over, he changed back because he was 
vastly more comfortable when freed from our 
collars and trousers ! 

Umbrellas. — As we have abeady remarked, it 
rains a good deal in Japan during certain seasons 
of the year, just as it does in England, but no 
one ever accused the English of utilizing their bad 
weather to add picturesqueness to their appear- 
ance, but the Japanese dol As soon as the rain 
comes on, out swarm yellow oiled-paper umbrel- 
las, large broad ones, useful to cover the load on a 
coolie's back as well as himself, or the baby peep- 
ing over its mother's shoulders. And always the 
bright color of the umbrella and its translucence 
lend a halo to the bearer that distinctly brightens 
the scene. Not only are these umbrellas never 
so gloomy and dispiriting as are ours, but also 
they are never so monotonous in effect, for 
painted upon them are effective ideographs giv- 
ing the owner's name, or the hotel where he is 
stopping, or the business house with which he is 
connected. Even the poorest carry them because 
they are so cheap, costing only twenty to thirty 
cents. They are surprisingly durable and imper- 



66 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

vious to the rain. Their only inconvenience is 
that they must be set out to dry after the rain 
is over, but this practice is also picturesque, for 
the day after a rain Japan blooms with innumer- 
able yellow umbrellas like great blossoms a-dry- 
ing in the sun. 

Clogs. — As practical and effective as their um- 
brellas for wet weather are their high wooden 
clogs. Japanese Hke and wear these clogs every- 
where outdoors, even in fine weather. When it 
is rainy, no other footgear provides so sure a 
guarantee of dry feet. Their use makes for a 
rather awkward gait but also insures those strong 
ankles with which this people are blest. Also, 
and furthermore, it puts a certain sound into a 
foreigner's head that ever after means for him 
"Japan" — a musical click as the clog strikes the 
ground and then a faint scuff between the clicks. 
They call this sound "koron-koron." Generally, 
the women strike the ground more sharply with 
one clog than the other, so that there is a distinct 
difference in the sounds produced — ^the note is 
higher for the foot striking the harder. Some 
one has said that if you stand above a city its 
sound, rising up, reaches you as one musical note 
— A flat for Naples, for example. In similar 
fashion, the musical "click, scuff, click, scuff" of 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 67 

wooden clogs is a memory one is sure to take home 
from Japan. 

Congress Gaiters. — Japanese lay off their 
footgear when they enter a house, and in the old 
days, before the invasion of things modern, this 
was quite simple, for the sandal or the clog 
slipped on or off quite readily. The shoe of 
western civilization presented quite a problem to 
the Japanese mind, for unbuttoning or unlacing 
meant time and trouble to him who had many 
times a day to shed these modern conveniences 
( ?) . Our old-fashioned "Congress gaiter," with- 
out laces or buttons, but with elastic sides making 
them equally easy to put on or off, has provided 
a solution for this problem, so the now despised 
Congress gaiter of the western world, after shak- 
ing off the dust of our unappreciative land, has 
taken up its residence in Japan, where it would 
seem to have filed naturalization papers. 

Bundles. — In our country bundles are not 
only a nuisance, — both one's own and other peo- 
ple's, — but also they are unsightly. Perhaps, if 
they were not so unsightly they would not be 
considered such nuisances, and yet nobody has 
ever undertaken such a needed aesthetic reform. 
But in Japan, bundles are actually picturesque! 
The more other people carry of them, the more 
do they thereby brighten the picture, and even 



68 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

your own bundles look so attractive as to make 
it positively pleasing to carry them about. The 
reason is that the Japanese have the custom of 
wrapping all bundles in colored pieces of stuff 
called "furoshiki," and these pieces might have 
been cut from Joseph's coat of many colors, so 
gay and variegated are they. The better the 
taste of the man or the woman, the better selected 
and combined are the hues of his or her handker- 
chief-like bundle-cover. Men carry their bundles 
just as our men do — in whatever happens to be 
the easiest way, but girls always carry theirs 
upon one of their arms, generally using the other 
to steady it. Schoolgirls on their way to or from 
school carry their books in this manner, and the 
gay little bundles add noticeably to the charming 
effect produced by a group of these merry little 
damsels, chatting busily together. 

Gold Teeth. — The gold fish which so abound 
in Japan are charming, but gold front teeth, now- 
adays equally abundant, are far from attractive. 
Of late years there has arisen there a craze for 
dentistry, and what is the use of investing money 
in modern dentistry unless you have something 
to show for it! This is one of the many cases in 
which it would be better to be an altruist, and 
refrain from seeking such ostentatiously opulent 
effects, but alas ! the gold front tooth has become 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 69 

so popular that "what cannot be cured must be 
endured." 

Railway Travel. — Their trains are very com- 
fortable, but unfortunately, neat as are the Japa- 
nese in their homes, and, indeed, everywhere else, 
they are not properly train-broken. They litter 
up the floor with orange peel, paper, cigarette 
butts, etc., — even in the first-class cars of the best 
express trains. Every once in a while their own 
newspapers indulge in tirades against this pecul- 
iarity, but it seems to persist notwithstanding. 
These untidy habits are somewhat offset by the 
constantly reappearing train-boy, brush in hand, 
who cleans up the debris cast down by careless 
passengers. 

Their railroads are all narrow gauge which, of 
course, means narrow cars, but not uncomfort- 
ably so, for the seats in the day coaches, and the 
berths in the sleeping cars (except in a few com- 
partments) run lengthwise the car. The dining 
cars are especially good, European food, now be- 
coming so popular among the Japanese, being 
always served. It is varied, well cooked, and 
quite cheap, so the dining cars enjoy a large pat- 
ronage and are full a large part of the day. The 
berths on the sleeping cars are as comfortable 
as ours. Even express trains do not run very 
fast in Japan, seldom exceeding an average of 



70 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

twenty-five miles an hour, and the result is that 
sleeping" cars are used for distances that would 
be considered too short for them in America. At 
every station there are boys selling "bento" or 
lunch boxes, very neat and appetizing in their 
make-up, and these boys do a thriving business, 
for the Japanese are good trenchermen. Most of 
the stations have large open wash-stands with 
brass bowls and faucets, and passengers patronize 
these conveniences in large numbers. The Japa- 
nese not only washes his hands and face but also 
his entire head, and like the clean, healthy animal 
he is, takes evident pleasure in his ablutions. 

Railways as Novelties. — Several amusing 
stories are told of the bewilderment which the 
railways, when first introduced, caused to the 
Japanese peasant. He was glad to avail himself 
of this novel convenience, but understood it not 
at all. He had always been accustomed to leave 
his clogs or sandals outside the door before enter- 
ing a house. To his unenlightened mind this rail- 
way car was a sort of a house, and therefore, be- 
fore mounting the car platform, he would slip off 
his footgear as usual, and later be much surprised 
and annoyed not to find them waiting for him 
when the train stopped at his station ! 

In this land of paper windows, the glass panes 
used in the railway cars had at first to be pro- 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 71 

tected against ignorance byi red lines painted 
across them. Otherwise the passengers, especially 
those travelling third class, would have bumped 
or (iut their heads through disregard of the unex- 
pected panes. 

English Spoken. — It is surprising how much 
English one hears in Japan. One is constantly 
reminded that ours is really a world language, 
and is daily becoming more so. Every Japanese 
schoolboy is required to study English five years, 
and although this no more guarantees fluency 
than does study of foreign languages among us, 
still it shows its effect. The Japanese youth loves 
to practise his English, and sometimes it seems to 
the traveller that the less he knows, the better he 
enjoys the practice. But on the whole, the result 
is useful for the Anglo-Saxon, because he can get 
about anywhere in Japan with no other language 
than his own far more comfortably than in any 
other foreign land. Even if he loses his way in a 
street or "gets stymied" (as a golfer would say) 
in some shop, there always turns up an amiable 
Japanese of recent education, very pleased to 
help out and at the same time practise his 
Enghsh. 

Sightseeing. — There is one purely Japanese 
trait that you will hardly notice during your first 
few weeks there, but thereafter it will grow 



72 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

rapidly in wonder — their amazing capacity for 
sightseeing. 

You are travelling for that purpose and there- 
fore will no more realize it at first than a man on 
a steamer feels the wind if it is blowing in the 
same direction he is steaming, but everywhere 
you go there will be groups of guide-conducted 
tourists — large groups — and all much interested 
in the sights and therefore strikingly different 
from the bored squads of Americans or English 
one sees being herded about the galleries of 
Europe. And even more surprising than the 
number, interest and frequency of these Japa- 
nese adult tourists are the classes or whole 
schools of young people bent on the same inquisi- 
tive and educating errand. Nor is it all "cakes 
and ale" for these student sightseers, for they 
must write down their impressions on the spot. 
I remember seeing several dozen boys about ten 
years old stopped by their teacher at the exit of 
the Kyoto Zoo because one of them had not 
finished writing out his views concerning the ani- 
mals! All these sightseers, whether school chil- 
dren or their elders, seem always to be having a 
beautiful time, a real holiday outing. To see 
them trooping into a Japanese hotel late in the 
afternoon, all talking and laughing at once, with 
none seeming tired or bored, no signs of an irk- 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 73 

some duty done that our tourists generally dis- 
play, gives one quite a side light upon the national 
capacity for getting pleasure out of everything, 
a trait that the generally happy face of the pass- 
erby on a Japanese street indicates. You can 
hardly travel anywhere in Japan without seeing 
whole trainloads of tourists on their way not only 
to accessible points of interest like Nara or Nikko 
or Kyoto, but also to more out-of-the-way sights 
like Amono-Hashidate or Miyajima. In a later 
chapter we will speak of the frequent pilgrimages 
(a type of religious sightseeing) which are so 
prevalent in Japan as to provide a striking 
parallel for the wide popularity similar visits to 
holy places enjoyed in Europe during the Middle 
Ages. All this means that the average Japanese 
will, if questioned, be found to have seen more of 
his own country than have any other people. 
"See Japan first" is as much his motto as ours 
is "travel abroad to complete your education." 
Japanese Inns. — Japanese hostelries deserve 
a better name than that which travellers usually 
give them. Just because of certain peculiarities 
of Japanese food, such as raw fish, sweet soup, 
etc., unpalatable to the Occidental, why should 
there be forgotten the exquisite neatness, the at- 
tention to your comfort, and the quaint customs 
always there found. "But I don't like sleeping 



74 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

on the floor" you say. How do you know whether 
you do or not until you try it in Japanese fashion? 
The deft little maids bring in a number of thick 
quilts called "futon." These are placed one on 
top of the other until the necessary softness and 
thickness has been attained. Then one, folded 
up, is placed under one end of the topmost futon 
to elevate it to the dignity of a pillow. Over the 
top of recumbent you is laid a comforter, thick 
or light, as the season demands. If you don't 
find that a comfortable bed, then you are a diffi- 
cult traveller to please ! 

When the Japanese travel they don't have to 
think about the toilet equipment which concerns 
you and me about to stop at an American or 
European hotel, because the Japanese inns pro- 
vide each patron with a fresh kimono to sleep in, 
a new tooth brush and, of course, towels and soap. 
Also, you wiU always find ready a hot bath, for 
don't forget you are in a land where everybody 
takes one daily. It is the strangeness of Japa- 
nese food, and the, for us, unpalatableness of 
many of its compounds, that clouds the memory 
of life at their inns. If you will only have the 
wit to learn which Japanese dishes you like and 
keep to them, you will soon learn why life in 
native inns is so attractive to the Japanese, a 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 75 

people who travel about in their own country 
more than any other nation in the world. 

Bridges. — Perhaps it is because the Japanese 
are such enthusiastic travellers and sightseers that 
the bridges of their countiy are so picturesque 
and varied in form. They certainly, for some 
reason or other, have been given particular con- 
sideration. Just as the Golden Milestone in the 
Roman Forum was the starting point from which 
road distances all over the Empire were meas- 
ured, so it is from a bridge, the Nihon-bashi in 
Tokyo, that starts the nation's great travel 
artery — the Tokaido road, which runs from the 
present capital to the ancient one of Kyoto. Col- 
lectors or admirers of Japanese color-prints will 
remember that many of the most interesting ones 
depict bridges on the Tokaido and that no two of 
them are alike. Almost always there is a grace- 
ful upward curve, for the Japanese does not like 
flat bridges. Sometimes he pushes this taste so 
far as to make a perfect half -circle of his arch, 
but such bridges are set in gardens or elsewhere 
to serve ornamental purposes only, for the diffi- 
culty of mounting their steep sides would mean 
delay to traffic seriously bent on going some- 
where. The sacred red bridge at Nikko (Miha- 
shi) , shut to all save royalty, has its graceful lines, 
brilliant color and wood and background repeated 



76 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

in many another spot in the Island Empire, and 
so has that other famous red bridge high up on 
the mountain slopes of Koya San. Frequent 
also is the use of the do-bashi, or bridge covered 
with an earthen roadway. This construction 
makes easy any repairs to the bridge surface, 
and is so attractive withal as to gain it space in 
formal gardens, as enhancing a pool's beauty. 
The old Chinese were very fond of thus introduc- 
ing bridges of some quaint form into their gar- 
dens, such as the one of zigzag stones leading to 
the Woo-Sing-Ding teahouse in Shanghai, and 
this fashion found a hearty welcome in Japan. 
Perhaps the most pleasing bridge of that type is 
the old one brought from the Bishamon to the 
Senten Gosho in Tokyo and described elsewhere. 
It is safe to say that no people save the Venetians 
have ever rivalled the aesthetic interest in bridges 
shown throughout Japan. 

Boats. — The familiar old Moody and Sankey 
hymn of "Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the 
shore," would not suit the Japanese, for with 
them a boat is not pulled; it is pushed! There 
the boatman stands instead of sitting, and pushes 
forward his boat by means of sculling over the 
stern with one long oar. Nor does this oar at all 
resemble that with which our boats are infre- 
quently propelled in similar fashion, for it is es- 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 77 

pecially made for this purpose, and consists of 
two long sections joined together at a sHght angle 
about half way up. At first sight it seems a 
clumsy contrivance intended only to make a long 
oar out of two short pieces, but try it, and you 
will find that the slight angle at the j oint not only 
increases your leverage for the short side strokes 
required in this sort of sculling, but also it materi- 
ally assists the feathering of the blade. 

Sometimes two of these oars are used at the 
same time, in which case the second sculler is 
stationed a little forward of his mate and on the 
opposite side of the boat. The oar is not oper- 
ated between tholepins, as in England, nor on a 
swivel set in the boat's side as in America. It 
has a short, small, wooden pin on the under side 
two or three inches long, which fits into a round 
socket on the gunwale, and it requires no little 
dexterity to keep the great oar from riding up 
in the air and unsocketing this pin. 

This method of boat propulsion has a marked 
effect upon the shape of the craft, for it neces- 
sitates a sharp, narrow, and long bow. In other 
parts of the Far East one sees this same sort of 
propulsion from the rear, though generally aided 
by oars pulled near the bow, but never in Japan. 

Lanterns. — After one has visited Japan his 
memories thereof will always be brightened by 



78 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

the mellow light of lanterns, — tiny ones on the 
jinrikishas, larger lanterns lighting the foot- 
steps of beelogged pedestrians, larger still before 
shops, and huge lanterns suspended in temples. 
Different "cho" (or sections of a city) when hold- 
ing religious festivities, hang out in front of each 
house large lanterns painted with the cho's ideo- 
graphs, and for these a wooden post is provided, 
with an umbrella or small roof to keep rain off 
the hght. Sometimes you pass through a village 
thus illuminated for a festival, and its warm 
mellow hght will not soon be forgotten. These 
lanterns are more durable than they look to be, 
and, because made of oiled paper, resist the 
weather to a surprising extent. PoHcemen al- 
ways carry them when on duty at night, marked 
with official ideographs, and the combination of a 
paper lantern with the formal western uniform 
of its bearer strikes an Occidental as very odd. 
Paper Windows. — At night Japanese houses 
seem to the foreigner rather like large lanterns 
because their windows (or rather, the front slid- 
ing panels that serve as windows) are but close 
trellises of wood over whose small interstices is 
pasted oiled paper. Out through these small 
panes there gleams the same mellow glow as that 
from the lanterns. It is a warm, cosy illumina- 
tion, whether given out by a home to the night 



i^EAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 79 

without, or carried by the wayfarer. The mem- 
ory of it is most persistent, for its light clings 
to the thought as does the perfume of roses about 
a picture of last year's garden. 

Houses of Rich and Poor. — In no other 
land is there so httle seeming disparity between 
the house of the rich man and his poor neigh- 
bor as in Japan. Perhaps the simplicity taught 
by the Shinto religion has much to do with this. 
At any rate, it is an obvious and commendable 
fact. Of com*se, the kakemono painting and the 
artistic objects displayed in the tokonoma of the 
poor man or the materials used for his house can- 
not vie in beauty or cost with those of the rich 
man similarly displayed, but the simple cleanli- 
ness and interior construction of both are the 
same and so is the form-— the same plain walls, 
mats, ceiling, and hibashi if it is cold. The nari- 
kin (as the nouveau riche — the war profiteer — 
is called) is apt to go in for European houses, 
and so are a few of the "quality" in Tokyo, but 
the vast majority of those possessing ample 
means still affect Japanese dwellings and a 
splendid simplicity that is more effective and 
surely more admirable than the average house 
of the unenlightened wealthy with us. 

Smallness of Women. — Of course, we all 
know that the Japanese are not a tall race, but 



80 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

the men one sees are strongly built, and though 
obviously shorter on the average than Occi- 
dentals, and especially than Anglo-Saxons, they 
do not seem in any way diminutive. But the 
women do, and their tininess will surprise you 
more than almost anything else in that land of 
surprises. N^ot only are they slenderly made, 
but also so short that not even their large head- 
dresses disguise it. 

Babies are numerous in Japan, and good- 
sized, square-headed, chunky babies, too. They 
always go strapped on their mothers' backs, and 
their size and wrappings by contrast make their 
slightly stooping parent seem even tinier than 
she is. Then, too, the national custom of squat- 
ting on the haunches make them when in that 
posture seem mere busts of women, so compactly 
do they fold up everything south of the long 
waistline marked by the broad obi, as their ex- 
ternal corset-belt is called. Always neat and 
spotlessly clean, the general effect is that of 
dainty little creatures — too dainty for the wear 
and tear of everyday life, and yet no land can 
show better or tidier housekeepers, or mothers 
so patriotic in their frequent child-bearing than 
these same diminutive dames of Nippon. 

Babies. — If babies could guide the storks that 
bring them, and knew the facts about Japan, 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 81 

every child-transporting stork that flew would 
surely be turned thither by his small passenger, 
for in no other land are they so constantly in the 
midst of all that goes on. A baby who travels 
about in a baby-carriage has his journeyings lim- 
ited by that vehicle's bulk, but the Japanese baby 
is constantly strapped on his mother's back ex- 
cept when he rides on his sister's. In either case 
he is sure of entertainment, for when with mother 
he oversees (from above!) all the family house- 
keeping, shopping, gossiping, etc., while small 
sisters never let baby interfere with their favorite 
sport of ball-playing or battledore and shuttle- 
cock. Baby is there all the time, with never a 
dull moment! Perhaps this is why you never 
hear him cry. In fact, not only the babies, but 
also all the children, seem merry souls, enjoying 
themselves always and everywhere. It is said 
that the country's population is increasing at 
the rate of 700,000 per year, and you will readily 
believe it after you have been there a while and 
seen the crowds of children, both in city and 
country. 

Street Games. — In no land do the children 
have a better time than in Japan, and sometimes 
it seems that they play most of their games in the 
streets, so numerously "under foot" are they in 
every city or town. Both girls and boys delight 



82f LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

in playing ball, not only with ordinary sized 
balls but also with balls extraordinary — much 
larger than their owners' heads ! The boys most- 
ly concern themselves with throwing and catch- 
ing as practice for their adored baseball. The 
girls, on the other hand, play a game in which 
proficiency means ability to bounce the ball a 
number of times with the sole of the wooden 
clog — a difficult performance. While one girl is 
bouncing, the others liven the sport by singing 
the score, quite like the Basque game of pelota. 
The girls are also skillful at playing their be- 
loved game of Yarihago, a sort of battledore and 
shuttlecock, the battledore being a bat-shaped 
piece of wood a foot long, and much decorated on 
one side, and the shuttlecock is a black seed gayly 
feathered. Singing the score is also a feature of 
this game. 

Japanese Carp. — We know the carp as a 
sluggish fish, but not so in Japan, where he is 
supposed to represent vigor and enterprise, and 
as such is a favorite emblem for boys. When the 
Boys' Festival is held in May they parade about 
carrying large paper carp. How much better 
this is than to have meaningless games. For a 
Japanese boy, the paper carp of his great holi- 
day means something, while the firecracker be- 
loved of our youth on the "Glorious Fourth" 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 83 

stands for mere noise. That great wood carver, 
Hidari Jingoro, has left a life-like monument 
to the energetic carp, for the right-hand panel of 
his charming gateway at the Higashi Otani, in 
Kyoto, shows that fish springing straight up a 
waterfall, a feat characteristic of the Japanese 
species. In this carving the artist rivals the 
technique of his Enghsh prototype, Grinling 
Gibbons, but has the advantage of depicting 
arrested motion instead of the still life preferred 
by the Westerner. 

Baseball. — Amid all the strange surround- 
ings whose every detail differs so markedly from 
things seen at home, the American finds one 
home-like sight, for baseball is as omnipresent 
in Japan as it is in the United States. Every 
small boy there goes about with a ball and catch- 
er's glove just as does his ilk with us. They play 
good ball, too. There are frequent open spaces 
in their cities and towns, and here baseball games 
are constantly in progress. Every vacant lot is 
similarly occupied with the boys busy with bat 
and ball. The fine play of some of their teams, 
such as that of Waseda University, is well known 
among us, and their general standard of baseball 
is distinctly good. The quality of their pitching 
does not equal ours, but that does not come in one 
generation. 



84. LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

After baseball (their favorite sport) comes 
next in order of popularity, tennis. Their tennis 
is not so good as their baseball, but a few indi- 
viduals like Kumagae (ranked third in the 
United States in 1919) play remarkably well. 
Track athletics are being introduced in the 
schools and universities, but are succeeding only 
fairly well. Their sprinters are not yet first class, 
nor are their competitors in the field events, nor 
even their middle distance men, for 4.35 is con- 
sidered a fast mile. On the other hand, it is al- 
ways easy to get out a large field of good men 
for a long-distance race, which is far from true 
in America. Neither the English Rugby game 
of football nor our own variety is succeeding in 
Japan, but they are fond of the English game 
ofiicially called "Association" and popularly 
loved as "Soccer," and play it well. Howing 
has not yet taken firm hold out there, except on 
the river Sumida, in Tokyo, where university 
men compete in wooden racing boats. 

The younger generation like Occidental sport, 
and as they are receiving hearty support and 
encouragement from their elders and from the 
authorities, it will surely continue to keep its 
place and do the work it everywhere performs 
of strengthening the youth both physically and 
mentally. 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 85 

Dangers From Automobiles. — An aged Ky- 
oto lady commenting upon the danger to human 
life caused by reckless automobile driving, com- 
pared it with the custom in feudal days of decapi- 
tating folk who got in the way of a daimyo upon 
the highway. "At least," said she, "due" notice 
was then sent in advance, of when he would travel 
and by which road, so that if you came to harm 
for interfering with him you had only yourself 
to blame. Perhaps it was a rather high-handed 
proceeding on the part of the daimyo, but you 
certainly had proper notice, and then, too, the 
relatives of the deceased had the satisfaction of 
knowing it was a daimyo who had put them in 
mourning. Nowadays an automobile driven by 
a mere nobody thinks nothing of running over 
anybody, and with absolutely no notice at aU !" 

Chrysanthemum Shows. — Nowhere out of 
Japan is so much heard of their chrysanthemum 
shows as in the United States, where that blos- 
som is greatly liked, grown and improved. And 
yet, because we did not begin by the shows at 
Tokyo, we were at first disappointed in what we 
saw. There is no denying the charm of the Uji 
show, near Kyoto, especially the dozen or more 
scenes from ancient history or legends, aU of 
whose many characters are made up of growing 
and blossoming chrysanthemum plants. In- 



86 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

tensely ingenious is the way in which, after the 
framework for one of these figures is fashioned, 
the small plants are woven in and out to com- 
plete them. Only the faces and hands are of 
papier mache or some similar substance — all else 
is plants or blossoms. Of course, only varieties 
with small flowers are selected for this purpose. 
Each one of these historical pictures is rendered 
doubly effective by the elaborate scenery pro- 
vided for it. We found this vastly curious and 
surprising, but the blooms, even the larger ones 
shown there in competition, fell below our antici- 
pations. Equally disappointing were the plants 
shown in several shows held in Kyoto temples, as 
well as those seen at the nurseries in Kyoto's out- 
skirts, near the Myoshin-ji. The best in that city 
were some we stumbled upon while attending a 
set of school games, and, although the exhibition 
was not widely advertised, it was very attractive. 
The great show held at Hibiya Park, Tokyo, late 
in November, not only lives up to one's highest 
expectations in the matter of fl.owers but also in 
the manner of their display. It is not indoors, 
as ours generally are, but consists of three wide 
avenues made by lines of flower booths, all 
alike, but each reserved for a separate exhibitor. 
Across the further end of these rows of booths 
is thrown a large half circle of others. Whether 



'LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 87 

visited by day or at night (when the flowers are 
excellently illumined from above) the tasteful 
display is equally pleasing. In the semi-circle 
of booths, the 1919 show had its potted "water- 
falls" of chrysanthemums, varieties strange to 
foreign eyes, and comparatively new even in 
Japan. Nothing could be more graceful than 
the way in which these masses of small blooms 
overflow from their pots and swing down in great 
bunches. Along the straight lines of booths are 
the more usual blossoms, but what beauties! 
huge, perfect, many of them strange in color or 
stranger still in exaggerations of plumpness or 
stringiness. Some pots showed a hundred or 
more blossoms from one root and, more than 
once, upon that sole root were grafted stems 
bearing flowers of contrasting colors I There 
were airplanes made of growing plants, some 
from only two roots or at most, three. It was 
not until the third or fourth visit that one could 
begin to feel that they really knew the show, so 
bewildering were the early impressions of color, 
shape and grace. 

Imperial Garden Party. — But even finer than 
the blossoms to be seen at Hibiya Park were 
those exhibited in the great park of the Akasaka 
Palace, in which is held the Imperial Garden 
Party. The booths in which they were displayed 



88 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

were not all assembled together as in Hibiya 
Park, but were grouped at different points 
among the evergreens or amid brilliant maples 
which so strikingly enliven the foliage of this 
large enclosure in the autumn. One display of 
blooms upon single stems of graded heights', par- 
ticularly lingers in the memory. The guests who 
wandered from one to another of these nests of 
booths were obviously of a higher level of floral 
criticism than those comprising the nondescript 
citizenry at Hibiya Park. They showed this by 
their more intense interest, and their friendly 
arguments upon certain blossoms' merits. The 
chrysanthemums lent a charmingly interesting 
background to that otherwise formal function, 
but one could not escape the regret that repeated 
visits to study and enjoy them could not here be 
vouchsafed as it is at Hibiya Park. 

Portable Gardens. — An odd title, isn't it! 
and yet that is just what they are. The Japanese 
call them "hako-niwa," and though their bases 
are only a couple of feet long and about a foot in 
width, this affords space enough for miniature 
scenes complete in every detail. At the Hibiya 
Park chrysanthemum show there was space re- 
served for a competition of these diminutive 
landscapes, and over seventy were entered for 
the prizes. Not only were there mountain scenes 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 89 

with chalets scattered among the rocks, and shore 
scenes with junks and fishermen, composed for 
every season of the year from spring to snowy 
winter, but even more esoteric effects were 
attempted, and that, too, with success. There 
was a very effective one showing a lone traveller 
struggling against a wind that bent low the 
bushes through which he was working his way: 
the traveller was about an inch high I The Japa- 
nese particularly admire mountainous scenery 
depicted thus in a portable compass, and stones 
suited to simulate the small mountains (such as 
those from Ishiyama on Lake Biwa) fetch fancy 
prices. 

Thinning Pine Foliage. — No matter how 
small the bit of ground intervening between his 
house and the street, every Japanese householder 
seems to wish a pine tree growing there. They 
are never allowed to grow tall, for their branches 
are so cut off and trained as to keep their foliage 
down near the house's roof. Every autumn these 
trees receive a treatment that none receive with 
us — it has its foliage carefully thinned out 
by expert gardeners. Each small tuft of pine 
needles is reduced in bulk, and a tree thus treat- 
ed looks like a plucked chicken, compared with 
its neighbor awaiting treatment. There is no 
doubt that this system has much to do with the 



90 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

healthy foliage of these household pines, for it 
prevents their catching too much snow in the 
winter and also encourages the new needles which 
will come with the spring. It certainly is an 
odd spectacle to see one of these gardeners up 
amid the branches of a small pine, intently mani- 
curing each tuft of needles in turn. 

Nev/ Year Decorations. — One expects to see 
Christmas trees in our homes during that festive 
season, or holly wreaths in the windows, but our 
only outdoor display of such decorations is at 
the shops where they are exposed for sale. New 
Year is as important a festival to the Japanese 
as is Christmas to us, but he believes in decorat- 
ing out of doors as well as within, which is very 
fortunate for the traveller from abroad. Out- 
side of most dwelling houses and many shops 
and office buildings as well is a bunched decora- 
tion composed of bamboo and pine — health and 
long life ! Generally this consists of three pieces 
of bamboo stalk, cut in different lengths, with 
pine branches tied about them. Most of these 
shrub -like bunches are not over four feet in 
height, and some have a neat border of rice straw 
about them at the ground. All along the streets 
hang Shinto ropes of clean rice straw, sometimes 
with a fringe of the same pendent from them. 
These festoons of rope and fringe are called 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 91 

wakazari, and are believed by the lower classes 
to keep away evil spirits. 

Seasonable Pictures. — Very sensible is the 
Japanese custom of displaying in the tokonoma 
(or art alcove of their living rooms) pictures or 
objects appropriate to the season. Thus he sets 
out in the autumn scenes depicting crows on per- 
simmon trees, deer under red-leaved maples, or 
the "seven flowers of autumn"; in the winter, 
pine trees and snow, bamboo and snow, wild 
geese and the moon, or the moon viewed through 
long dry grass such as grows on the Musashi 
plain outside Tokyo; dming the shift from win- 
ter to spring (there a slow, and not a sudden 
process as with us), plum blossoms and snow, or 
if the spring be really arrived, nightingales with 
the plum blossoms, or cherry trees, etc. 

It is interesting to note the difference between 
the types of people drawn out to parks or ex- 
hibitions to view the different blossoms — those 
of the plum appeal to the more refined and lit- 
erary sort, while the cherry blossoms attract 
the proletariat, etc. Chrysanthemum shows are 
mostly frequented by painstaking folk who by 
their remarks and careful study of the plants 
exhibited remind one of the Dutchman enjoying 
tulips, upon whose culture he expends so much 
care. 



92 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

Viewing Paintings. — In one respect Japanese 
painters enjoy an advantage over their Occi- 
dental colleagues — tliey know in advance exactly 
the level from which their pictures will be seen, 
which the Westerner never does. Very few of 
the paintings accepted for one of our art exhibi- 
tions can be hung "on the line," as it is called, 
and of those ranging above these fortunate ones, 
some are so hopelessly "skied" as to lose much of 
their effect. Then, too, if and when the painter 
is so lucky as to sell his work, he has no idea how 
high or low it will be hung in the home of its 
purchaser. A few days spent in such an art 
centre as Kyoto teaches us that most Japanese 
paintings are executed either upon fusuma (slid- 
ing panels constituting the walls of a room) or 
upon screens, and because they will therefore 
always be viewed by folk seated upon the floor, 
the artist knows exactly how to adjust his com- 
position and perspective best to suit the eye. 
The only other important type of paintings, those 
on scrolls (or kakemono) are generally exhibited 
by being hung in the tokonoma or art alcove, 
found at the end of every Japanese living room, 
which means that here also the artist knows in 
advance the approximate level of the observer's 
eye. 

Sometimes, but infrequently, framed pictures 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 93 

(such as those of the Thirty-Six Poets, etc.) are 
hung up near the ceiling with their lower edge 
touching the frieze line, but in that event they are 
always leaned far out, which, considering that 
Japanese rooms are not lofty, facilitates their 
inspection. The Japanese painter, of whatever 
century, has never realized how much more for- 
tunate he is than his Western brother, so often 
distressed by seeing his picture, meant to be sus- 
pended at the eye-level of a standing observer, 
hung up close to the ceihng or too low down. 

Ceremonial Processions. — One day we mo- 
tored over from Kyoto to visit the town of Otsu 
on Lake Biwa, and happened upon an annual 
procession which has been taking place there for 
more than a hundred years. To an outsider its 
purpose seems to be the display of eight or nine 
gorgeous structures each built upon a massive 
two-wheeled cart dragged by long lines of citi- 
zens. The metal mountings of the wheels and 
other parts were more ornate. Above each rose 
a square edifice, its sides resplendent with ancient 
embroideries and tapestries, some of the latter of 
16th century Flemish provenance. Under an 
ornate roof at the top were youthful musicians, 
earnestly occupied in the wholesale dispatch of 
sound waves. These dwellers aloft were so far 
from the street as to be above the second story 



94. LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

of such houses as possessed one, and access to 
the cart-tops was possible only from an upstairs 
room. So pleased were we by the color, gayety, 
and general allure of this parade that we became 
as addicted to "attending" them wherever and 
whenever possible as are some American males 
to attending fires. Every city has several such 
historical processions during the year, some of 
such importance as to earn recognition by a 
representative from the office of the Imperial 
Household in Tokyo. We liked best those we 
saw in Kyoto. One famous one, held October 
22nd in every year, commemorates the annual 
procession of daimyos who, under the Shoguns, 
repaired yearly to Kyoto to pay their respects 
to the Emperor. For this procession there is 
brought out from the storehouses a great wealth 
not only of ancient costume, but also travelling 
equipment, such as large lacquer boxes for gar- 
ments, for footwear, for food, etc. The display 
of colored robes and ancient arms and armor 
makes this ceremonial most helpful in picturing 
a long dead past. 

Many of these processions are religious in 
character and in these there generally appear 
large shrines so heavily weighted as to necessi- 
tate for their carriage the shoulders of sev- 
eral score bearers, who enliven their task by 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 95 

rushing their burden from side to side of the 
street or backward and forward. If at night, 
this burden may be a great bamboo structure 
bearing numerous large lanterns. We saw one 
such parade in a small western town on the Japan 
Sea, and while the shrine was thus being hurtled 
hither and yon in the main street to the vast en- 
joyment of the bearers but confusion of the on- 
lookers, the head priest in his ancient silken robes 
was quietly progressing, seated in state in a soli- 
tary jinrikisha. How that vehicle got to that 
remote and small village we never knew, but its 
importance was evidently receiving due recogni- 
tion. Every Japanese city is divided into cho, 
or sections corresponding to a big block of houses, 
and in some parades a section is allotted to each 
cho, so that its residents may seek to outdo the 
display of a neighboring cho. In one Kyoto 
parade, each cho carried at its head a long pole 
surmounted by a pHable metal ornament (a 
Fudu sword) adorned with bells which the bear- 
ers sounded by a continual agitation of the pole — 
a feat requiring joint effort plus much strength. 
Puppets. — Nothing you have ever seen any- 
where will in the least prepare you for the Pup- 
pet Shows or Marionettes. They are not figures 
operated by wires, nor are they run on the Punch 
and Judy lines, so familiar to Occidental child- 



96 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

hood. Not at all! You enter what appears to 
be an ordinary Japanese theatre, which is already 
surprise enough for the foreigner, for instead of 
chairs or benches arranged in rows, he will find 
small square spaces partitioned off on the floor 
by boards about a foot high, each space accom- 
modating four theatre-goers squatted upon cush- 
ions. They will be close together with only a 
little spare space for the inevitable teapot and 
cups, plus sweetmeats brought in by attentive 
attendants for a trifling fee. The best of the 
puppet shows are at Osaka and Kyoto, but they 
travel about and give their performances in other- 
cities. Don't miss seeing them if they ever come 
your way. When the curtain rises, you will ob- 
serve the usual scenery, but it will be on a scale 
suited to small personages about three and a half 
feet tall — the average height of these puppets. 
And now they begin to appear, and, to your 
amazement, each has its legs, arms, head, etc., 
operated by one or two or sometimes three men 
dressed all in black gowns, black hoods with eye- 
sHts, black gloves, etc. These operators are sup- 
posed to be invisible, and, strangely enough, after 
a few moments you cease to notice them, so en- 
grossed do you become in the life-like activities 
of the brightly dressed figures. Their eyes move, 
so do their foreheads and mouths — they open and 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 97 

shut fans, and handle all sorts of weapons and 
utensils. "Yes, but how do they talk?" say you. 
At one side of the stage, upon a sort of pulpit, 
squats a man before a reading desk, upon which 
lies the book of the play, and by his side a samisen 
player. As the reader proceeds with the con- 
versation of the play, using different voices for 
the different characters, the samisen player's 
music represents emotions suiting the words, 
just as the motif played by the orchestra at a 
Wagnerian opera explains the speech upon the 
stage which it accompanies. So realistic do these 
two men render the life-like gestures of the 
puppets that the audience is moved to tears or 
laughter as readily as they would be by living 
actors at a regular theatre. 

Theatre. — Prepare yourself with as high ex- 
pectations as possible before you go to a Japa- 
nese theatre, and expect the unexpected — you 
will not be disappointed. We have already, at 
the Marionettes or Puppet Show, seen how the 
audience squats on cushions in square box-like 
enclosures, generally accommodating four. So 
it is also at the theatres, but downstairs, in what 
we call the orchestra, these enclosures are sunken 
below the level of the narrow passageways, upon 
which attendants come and go, bringing tea, 
fruit, sweetmeats, or boxes to assist smokers in 



98 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

getting safely rid of their ashes, matches, etc. 
One of these passageways right out through the 
middle of the audience is sometimes used by the 
actors, who will thus rush off to battle, etc., in 
most convincing manner. The scenery is excel- 
lent, especially that used in the foreground, such 
as houses, rocks, trees, bridges, etc. At the Ka- 
bukiza Theatre in Tokyo they have a revolving 
stage, so that when one scene is completed, the 
lights are lowered, the stage is revolved, and the 
piece goes forward with no delay for scenery set- 
ting, because it has been set while the preceding 
scene was being enacted. Women's parts are 
almost always taken by men, who, however, simu- 
late feminine voices. It is said that the theatre, 
geisha dancing, puppet shows, and all kindred 
entertainments alike had their beginnings in the 
Noh dance, and certainly attendance at one of 
those antique survivals adds to one's understand- 
ing of the other more modern manifestations. 

Noh Dance. — These so-called dances are real- 
ly long plays telling a story with a moral, and are 
therefore rather religious than terpsichorean in 
character. They are gradually losing their popu- 
larity, so much so that they are now generally 
given by subscription. The stage must always 
be constructed in a certain manner, square in 
shape, with a minor access from one side through 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 99 

a small door (ordinarily kept shut), but most of 
the characters come on and go off by means of 
a long open passageway leading to the stage from 
the side opposite the little door. There is no at- 
tempt at scenery, but always a pine tree painted 
on the back wall, and, of course, the purple cloth 
of ceremony with its white ideographs draped 
above across the entire front. One point of the 
construction you must certainly notice, for in 
this respect the Noh stage differs sharply from 
that of the ordinary theatre — it is separated from 
the audience by a narrow interval paved with 
small stones or pebbles. This interval serves con- 
stantly to remind the audience that the actors are 
in a world apart, and that they may therefore ex- 
pect to witness acts and episodes quite different 
from those possible in everyday life. The cos- 
tumes are gorgeous, which is to be expected, but 
most unexpected are the voices of the actors and 
their manner of walking. The voice used is an 
entirely unnatural one, with all possible throati- 
ness brought out. In a word, that which we dis- 
like in the human voice, and wish to suppress, the 
Japanese like in their actors, and seek to develop 
to its uttermost possibility. The walk they affect 
is equally unnatural, but very graceful and pleas- 
ing. The placing of each foot is carefully studied 
and timed, the toes being thrust forward seem- 



100 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

ingly to guide the foot to its place on the floor. 
This same gait is used in the tea ceremony, and 
its successful use is much appreciated and highly 
esteemed. In one respect the Noh dance is like 
the old Greek plays — it has a Chorus which con- 
stantly throughout the development of the story 
explains it and sometimes predicts the action of 
the piece. Unlike the Greek Chorus, these Japa- 
nese are seated upon the stage with the actors, 
as are also musicians who from time to time are 
brought in. Of all the numerous dramatic effects 
sought and effectively rendered, the most appre- 
ciated is that of suppressed passion by the hero 
or the villain, and sometimes it is thrown out into 
high relief by the buffoonery of a low comedian 
servant or retainer, or else a serious piece is fol- 
lowed by a farce or comic dance. Perhaps the 
average foreigner will find the action of the Noh 
dance too drawn out and retarded. On one occa- 
sion in Kyoto the Chorus sat alone upon the stage 
and for fifty-five minutes intoned an explanation 
of what the principal characters had been doing 
and saying! Such periods can, however, be in- 
terestingly employed in studying the audience. 
It will be found to contain about equal parts of 
men and women. Among the men there will be 
many of advanced age, always with an open book 
with which they carefully follow all that is said 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 101' 

on the stage. Nor is this studious interest con- 
fined to the elderly, for it is equally true of the 
young men and maidens. Altogether, the im- 
pression one takes away from a Noh dance is 
similar to that one receives at an opera house 
when "Parsifal" is being rendered — the same 
general study of the text, interest not only in see- 
ing and hearing, but also in the development of 
the motifs by the orchestra, close attention by 
differing ages of both sexes, etc. 

A Geisha Party. — When Oishi Kuranosuke, 
the leader of the Forty- Seven Ronins, in order 
to conceal his purpose to avenge the death of the 
daimyo they had served, feigned a dissolute lifcj 
it was at the Ichi Rild tea-house in Kyoto he 
committed his excesses. After the Konins had 
achieved their purpose of slaying their dead 
master's enemy, thereby setting a standard of 
loyalty so greatly admired by all Japanese, that 
tea-house set up and has ever since maintained a 
shrine to the Ronin's leader. Mr. Hamaguchi, 
the versatile-minded manager of the Miyako 
Hotel, arranged for us in this historic tea-house, 
a geisha party for which he selected the best that 
the famous geisha school of Kyoto produced. 
There were four dancing girls, thirteen or four- 
teen years old, and also several older girls who 
played the samisen for the dancing, or served the 



102 LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 

dinner and would have entertained us with their 
witty Conversation had we known enough Jap- 
anese to understand them. We were met at the 
door by the manageress, who wore above her obi 
an additional cincture of red cloth, indicating that 
hers was one of the half dozen first class tea- 
houses of the city. Also were there as usual 
several servants crouched on the floor, bowing till 
their heads touched it. We were led in through 
several small intensely neat rooms to see the 
shrine of the loyal Ronin, and were finally in- 
stalled in one of the two rooms reserved for us. 
We sat (more or less comfortably, and less grace- 
fully) upon cushions, each with an arm rest, 
which was really a life-saver for those unaccus- 
tomed to long squatting on the floor. The ad- 
joining room served as a sort of stage for the 
earher dances, requiring more perspective than 
the later ones. Some of these were really re- 
markable for their clear portrayal of the story 
which every dance requires as a basis. There 
were two or three pas seul, one of them showing 
a lion hunting at night. Fancy a brilliantly cos- 
tumed girl of thirteen, with no implement but a 
fan, imitating a lion! — it sounds futile, doesn't 
it? and yet, strange to say, she was a lion, a hun- 
gry, agile, sleek and ever dangerous lion. Later, 
during lulls in the elaborate Japanese dinner. 



LEAVES FROM A NOTEBOOK 103 

with its frequently recurring soups and innumer- 
able small dishesj we witnessed some of the more 
elaborate dances requiring four in their execution. 
The swirl of the kimono sleeves, accentuated by 
their gay hues and deft use of dainty fans left 
such an impression of grace and rhythm swung 
in color as readily to explain why the Japanese 
never tire of this form of entertainment. 

And now there came an interlude distinctly 
unusual in such an evening. My small son, aged 
eleven, took up a samisen and played a tune. At 
once the geisha party became a children's party ! 
The little dancers crowded around him, and after 
applauding his effort, went on to engage him 
and his governess in certain games known to all 
children, such as those played by throwing out 
the hand with some fingers extended, etc. A 
strange ending for an evening begun with rever- 
ence to an ancient act of vengeful loyalty by; a 
fighting man, and developed by a modern and 
distinctly adult manifestation of music, dancing 
and costume. It started with the aboriginal man 
and after passing by the eternal feminine, ended 
with the perennial child! 

Tokyo Geisha. — The Tokyo style of geisha 
dancing differs noticeably from that of Kyoto, 
and although more up to date and elaborate, 
yields first place in public esteem to the older 



io4j leaves from a notebook 

school of the ancient Imperial capital. At Tokyo 
the musicians are generally seated at the back, 
behind the dancers. Then, too, the dancers there 
sometimes use bits of what our stage men would 
call "property" to help in the telHng of the 
dance's story. For example, two girls dressed as 
fishermen of the olden times, executed a charming 
representation of hfe on a fishing boat, but they 
were aided by) a bit of board painted to repre- 
sent a ship's side, placed between them and their 
audience. You would not see this in Kyoto, nor 
would the dancers there wear special costumes 
for particular dances. The amount of money 
spent on these geisha parties is so great as to re- 
mind one of private entertainments at home in 
which leading singers from the Opera House take 
part. 



CHAPTER y 

SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS AND THEIR THOUGHT 

The chief outstanding difference to the trav- 
eller between things Oriental and those to which 
he has been accustomed at home is that in the Far 
East everything means something — thought is 
behind every sight or fact, and one is supposed to 
reahze this and recognize at least part of the 
thought. Lovers of Kiphng know that he so out- 
lines his stories as to leave the reader much to 
fill in from one's own imagination or mental ex- 
periences. So it is with the Orient. If you are 
not prepared and equipped to see behind and 
through its sights their underlying thought you 
will never understand the beauty of the land, the 
mentality of its people, or the international ex- 
pression of its purpose as evidenced in its foreign 
pohcies. Nor will you know how our own policies 
should be shaped so as to reach Oriental appre- 
ciation. To render its point of view more un- 
derstandable let us go to the heart of old Japan, 
which is Kyoto, and to the heart of its heart, those 
ancient gardens which more beautifully than any 

105 



106 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

other of its expressions, explain to the foreign 
traveller how the thought -processes of the people 
have long been accustomed to externalize them- 
selves. This may sound abstruse, but it isn't — 
it is delightfully and artistically simple. The 
gestheticism of every nation attracts and enhsts 
many of its finest minds, and of gardens in Japan 
this has long been true. It would be difficult to 
imagine a more pleasing environment than they 
afford for those seeking to learn how Japanese 
think, and how their thinking tends to express 
itself materially. 

Once upon a time there was a mighty warrior, 
Kumagaye Naozane by name, whose prowess in 
battle was known throughout all Japan. We can 
still see his huge sword, and from its unusual size 
realize the physical strength of him who wielded 
such a weapon. A tragic episode, the slaying 
of a boy disguised as the enemy's champion, 
abruptly turned him toward a life of religious 
seclusion. He made his way to the Buddhist 
temple of Kurodani in Kyoto, and hanging his 
armor on a great pine tree in the courtyard, 
passed through the sanctuary, and coming out 
into the garden beyond, cast into its tranquil pool 
his widely feared sword. The thought of the 
Kurodani garden reached out and laying hold 
upon the war sick veteran drew him into its haven 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 107 

of mind. Let us, too, turning from our five years' 
absorption in war's horrors, yield to this same 
lure, and together we shall see whither thought 
in and of these old Kyoto gardens will lead us. 
Perhaps they will show us how Japanese think. 
What this 12th century hero's plunging his trusty 
blade into Kurodani's pool acknowledged of a 
garden's attraction and deeper meaning has held 
true down through all Japan's history. More- 
over, in other and differing lands it finds a sym- 
pathetic echo, growing stronger as their culture 
mounts higher. But the Japanese lead all other 
garden-lovers in embodying more thought in 
those retreats from worldly turmoil. The more 
you put into a thing, the more you get out of it. 
Just as they have always put more thought into 
their gardens than we have into ours, so do their 
gardens superinduce more thinking on the part 
of the visitor than do ours. An English rose 
garden means sight and smell, but a Japanese 
one spells thought expressed in a harmony of 
nature, — thought that begets thinking, and that, 
too, of a formal, definite and practical type. It 
is often overlooked that there is a practical side 
to the mental fertilization of attractive surround- 
ings. We are all agreed that nothing is of 
greater consequence to man than thought, and 
we shall see that to assist it is the main purpose 



108 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

of the Japanese garden. It must always have 
its legend to tell or historical view to recall. The 
Abbot's garden just below the gorgeous lyeyasu 
mausolea on the cryptomeria-clad Nikko hill- 
side represents the Hak-kei or eight famous views 
of faraway Lake Biwa. The Katsura Palace 
garden near Kyoto sets out in detail an old Chi- 
nese poem known to all Japanese literati. Unless 
one is equipped with this mental key^ to a Jap- 
anese garden, his physical entrance therein yields 
no translation of its secret charm. 

One more introductory thought, — ^you must 
dismiss flowers from your expectations during 
our rambles among these ancient formal gardens, 
composed to be enjoyed during every season of 
the year alike. The Japanese works out his love 
for colored blooms away from his gardens, out 
where he can enjoy color in the mass. He has 
both the long spring of England and an even 
longer autumn than America (Kyoto maples 
are most brilliant in mid-November), while Eng- 
land lacks our autumn and we her spring. He 
begins with his plum blossoms in February, then 
peach, pear and cherry trees in April, followed 
by wistaria and azaleas in May, iris in June, and 
so on until the lotus in August ends the gorgeous 
procession, when, temporarily sated with masses 
of color, he awaits November with its soberer 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 109 

chrysanthemum joys. But back in his formal 
gardens you will find only an occasional cherry 
tree for its spring value, or sundry maples for 
their autumn glory, — never in clumps for their 
own display, but always to assist the general 
picture, and to bring out the other charms with 
which they are here associated. Even when thus 
used, their color enters but sparingly into the 
artist's scheme. It is true that mass effects of 
blossoming fruit trees, maples, etc., are frequent 
in Japanese scenery, but not in the gentle and 
retired art which we are considering. Flower 
gardens of the scale and type known and loved 
in America, as well as those in the English 
manner, are practically unknown in the Orient. 
In passing it should be remarked that the Jap- 
anese are no more skilful as translators of nature 
into formal gardens than in their amazing deft- 
ness of flower arrangement. They assemble into 
one vase differing types of flowers, — the tall and 
the short, the stiff and the bending, or the bright 
colored with others of duller hue, but so intelli- 
gently are they combined that together they are 
more effective than when seen separately. Here 
lies a pregnant thought for the student of inter- 
national relations, seeking a way to better under- 
standing between such contrasting peoples as 
the Japanese and ourselves. Frankly recognize 



110 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

the inequalities between our two civilizations, and 
then, instead of criticizing, strive to balance those 
inequalities. 

Almost always the central feature of a Jap- 
anese garden is a small pond, just as in England 
there is generally a lawn. The centering sig- 
nificance of this pond, whose feeding and out- 
let streams are the garden's very blood, was 
understood by the warrior Kumagaye seeking 
asylum for his sword, and we too shall see it with 
his eyes before our garden rambles are at an end. 
The conventions required that although the com- 
plete outline of a pond be not visible from any 
one viewpoint, both its source of water supply and 
the outlet must be shown or indicated, otherwise 
it is "dead water," and anathema! The inflow 
should be from the east, the main direction of 
the current southerly, and the outlet toward the 
west; — to run from west to east would be un- 
lucky ! The many shapes allowed for an elegant 
pond have each a name, — for example, if the right 
portion doubles the other's width and is round, 
it is called "heart" shape, because accommodat- 
ing the Chinese ideograph thereof. If a similar 
bulge is to the left, it is named "water," again 
because of a Chinese ideograph's configuration. 

There must also always be trees, but thought- 
fully chosen and combined with a regard for their 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 111 

significance; at least four-fifths should be ever- 
greens. Sen-no-Rikyu (1521-1591) used large 
trees in his foregrounds and lesser ones behind 
them, thus inaugurating the "Distance Lower- 
ing" style (Saki-sagari) as opposed to the cus- 
tomary "Distance Raising" one (Saki-agari). A 
favorite trio is the pine, bamboo, and plum tree, 
because they represent the three prime virtues 
of manhood — energy, constancy and uprightness. 
Even before the winter snows have gone the en- 
ergetic plum tree shoots out its compact blossoms, 
thus symbolizing pluck in nature. The unchang- 
ing foliage of the long-lived pine represents the 
second virtue, while the bamboo with its open 
heart and stiffly perpendicular growth shows us 
the third. 

The stones of differing size and shape, so much 
used and prized by Japanese garden architects, 
each tell part of the picture's story. They are 
brought from all parts of the country and com- 
mand fancy prices. Indeed, during the Tempo 
period (1830-44), so extravagant grew this craze 
that the government had to issue an edict limiting 
the price one could pay for one! Each shape has 
a name and a meaning of its own, which you 
should know fully to comprehend a garden's leg- 
end. Even the stepping-stones, so frequent in 
the paths, tell something, as does also their plac- 



112 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

ing. A height of six inches was permissible only 
for those in Imperial gardens, four inches being 
enough for daimyos, three for samurai, and one 
and a half for plainer folk. This interest in 
stones reached its limit in the Kare Sansui, or 
"dried-up-water-scenery," from which actual 
water is excluded, and only indicated by stones 
placed in a studied manner. An interesting ex- 
ample of this is at the Shinnyo-in, which belongs 
to the Honkoku-ji. 

What may be meant by the graceful little 
bridges which contribute so greatly to the 
pleasing harmony of the whole, will be told 
later in our story. Most of the old gardens will 
be found attached to temples, and this is both 
fitting and proper, for here thought is led back to 
the great Power House which under varying 
names men worship as God. And where has man 
constructed a fitter temple for high thought than 
a fair garden? Gardens anywhere are but pearls 
which, strung on a great golden thread of 
thought, lead back to the original Eden, where, 
pure as the harmony of nature about them, Adam 
and Eve walked in the cool of the evening, un- 
afraid, before the Creator. 

Near these temple gardens are often sta- 
tioned pagodas, those picturesque features of 
the Oriental landscapes, and consideration of 



SOME OLD ICYOTO GARDENS 113 

their structure will add another thought- 
product to our gardens' plentiful yield. Al- 
though the frequent earthquakes make Japan 
a land of low wooden structures, these lofty 
pagodas are never overthrown by even the most 
violent and prolonged shocks. Why? — the Oc- 
cidental architect will give credit to the long beam 
which, after protruding high in the air above the 
pointed roof, runs down through the building's 
centre, and, because it is not fixed to the earth, 
serves as a great gyroscope which, swaying in 
the earthquake, preserves the pagoda's balance. 
But what will the Buddhist priest say? — he whose 
forerunners long ago brought these airy and 
graceful edifices to Japan. He will tell us that 
the pole represents Eternal Truth running up 
through all creation; that the nine rings encir- 
cling it above the roof together symbolize per- 
fection, three times the complete number three ; — 
that the ball with a point at the top and three 
ridges of metal flames represents eternity. Es- 
pecially will he insist that the long pole is pur- 
posely kept from touching the earth because 
Eternal Truth is not based on matter, but retains 
freedom of adjustment to meet every change in 
the material conditions which may surround it. 
To the Buddhist, therefore, whose religious be- 
liefs gave Japan their pagodas, they are every- 



114 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

where upstanding lessons mutely teaching the 
passerby the preseri'ng and beautifying power 
of Eternal Truth. 

Kyoto was the Imperial capital from 794 un- 
til 1868, when the Mikado transferred his seat of 
government to Tokyo, and therefore it is but 
natural that Japan's greatest display of all that 
royalty could command is assembled in and about 
that city. The charm of its situation, nestled 
amid a wide-flung circle of protecting hills, es- 
pecially lends itself to the fancy and the genius 
of the garden maker, so it is not surprising that 
a great school of them here arose and developed 
under imperial, princely and priestly patronage. 
The Kyoto hiUs afford unsurpassed backgrounds, 
and the numerous gardens set against or fitted 
into them are in every" way worthy of their nature 
settings. When necessary to install a garden 
within the city proper, hilly backgrounds were 
simulated, and these artificial hillocks challenge 
detection. 

Of late years factories and other unsightly im- 
pedimenta of modern commerce have begun to 
intrude upon the beauty of some of these old 
enclosures. This is particularly noticeable about 
that of the Awata Palace, where the two great 
masters, Kobori Enshu and Soami, collaborated, 
Soami doing the southern half while his rival did 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 115 

the othero Thsre they contrived a sequestered 
nook called the "Sorrow Forgetting Terrace," 
where Oda Nobunaga, that warlike imperialist 
might sit unobserved and look out across the pic- 
turesque city to the hills beyond. That ancient 
aspect has been ruined by the intrusion upon its 
foreground of certain factories, but they are 
about to yield to another modern product, — a 
Municipal Art Commission has recently been 
established, and will remove unsightly buildings 
outside the city, so that once more the view pre- 
pared for the long-dead Shogun will be available 
for modern eyes. In the meantime the visitor, 
gazing inward from the wall, may feast his ap- 
preciations upon the graceful stone bridges, tiny 
islands and sheltering trees that together enhance 
the attractiveness of the oddly shaped "Dragon's 
Heart" pool at the centre. At the Joju-in, the 
residence of the Abbot of Kyomizu-dera (on the 
left as one mounts the steps to the temple) , Soami 
and Kabori Enshu again treated the same prob- 
lem, but instead of apportioning it between them, 
as at the Awata, here Soami designed the whole 
garden in the first place, and then, later on, his 
rival improved upon it. It was a case of "paint- 
ing the lily," but he painted it successfully. A 
local guidebook written in quaint English re- 
marks that "it is a finest garden," and it truly is. 



116 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

The rooms at the Awata Palace facing on the 
garden are walled with painted fusuma (or slid- 
ing screens) and afford a charming coign of van- 
tage from which to view it, especially the one 
across whose fusuma is pictured the story of 
sundry poets stationed along a watercourse run- 
ning through a garden, engaged in a pastime of 
Chinese origin, indulged in on the third day of 
the third month. Down the stream float wine- 
cups borne upon lotus leaves, and each poet in 
turn must write a verse whilst a cup is floating 
toward him from his next neighbor upstream. 
Downstream some mischievous boys are drawing 
the cups ashore and draining them. This reminds 
us that the more Chinesy an old Japanese paint- 
ing (and to resemble the Chinese was one of the 
canons of art excellence), the more certainly 
must there be children depicted therein. A room 
at the !Nanzenji temple painted by Kano Eitoku 
(one of the finest in all Kyoto) shows upon its 
dulled gold backgrounds eighteen children among 
its sixty-nine figures. The writer quite sym- 
pathizes with the Awata poets' selection of a spot 
for Hterary composition, for this chapter is being 
written "lentus in umbra," partly in the lovely 
Konchi-in garden and partly under the giant 
cryptomeria trees in the twelve-centuries-old park 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 117 

at Nara, with herds of tame deer browsing quietly 
about. 

We have already noticed that at the Kurodani 
Temple and the Awata Palace, as in most Jap- 
anese gardens, the pond with its rippling rivu- 
lets and waterfalls is the dominating feature of 
the artificial landscape. There must always be 
waterfalls lest we forget the power that sleeps 
in water. This is a thought which begets think- 
ing upon the Japanese appreciation of that 
power. Nowhere throughout those islands is 
one ever far from the hills with their frequent 
watercourses, which from time immemorial have 
done their part in the nation's industry. These 
streams mean a wealth of water-power, and of its 
significance to Japan we have ah-eady spoken. 

But let us follow this thought-thread back to 
our gardens away from which it led us off into 
the heart of the great problem of industrial 
power. Let it bring us to the balcony of the Kin- 
kaku-ji or Golden Pavilion where, as we toss 
bits of bread to a struggling throng of overgrown 
gold fish and look out upon a winsome wood- 
land picture, melodious waterfalls nearby whisper 
"Power, power." This garden was already an 
old one when in 1285 Emperor Go-Ude visited 
it. It came into its chief glory when given to 
Yoshimitsu, the greatest Shogun of the Ashikaga 



118 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

family, who began to live here in 1395. It was 
he who built this graceful three storied wooden 
pavilion and gilded it. A match could at any 
time destroy the flimsy structure, and yet there 
it has stood for centuries, hidden among its shel- 
tering trees and musing above its Mirror Pond 
(whose three islets represent Japan's three prin- 
cipal islands) whilst many a massive edifice of 
enduring stone or brick has disappeared or fallen 
into unrecognizable ruins. The great Ashikaga 
family ruled as Shoguns from 1338 until 1573, 
and preceded that even mightier family of Sho- 
guns, the Tokugawas, who governed from 1600 
until 1867, when occurred the restoration of power 
to the Emperor. To these Tokugawas the whole 
artistic world is indebted for that amazing glory 
of lacquer, color and carvings known as the lye- 
yasu and the lyemitsu mausolea, enshrined upon 
the Nikko hills amid the giant cryptomeria trees. 
The seclusion of these old Shogun potentates' 
gardens yields another thought-thread, this time 
leading out into the field of governmental ad- 
ministration. Students of history sometimes 
marvel at the fact that for over six and a half 
centuries the Imperial power was usurped hy 
the Shoguns, who left the Emperors nothing but 
the empty shell of court life, adorned and lux- 
uriously disguised as its powerlessness might be. 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 119 

and generally was. But why should we consider 
this so-called usurpation as at all strange? How 
are England and France governed today? Is 
it not the English Prime Minister and not the 
King who really rules the land? — and was it not 
the President of the French Council of Ministers 
(the Premier), that splendid veteran statesman 
Georges Clemenceau, and not the President, who 
really governed France during the recent and 
greatest crisis in her history? This invention 
of the Shoguns relieved the real adminstrative 
head of the Government from much time-exact- 
ing routine of state functions, leaving him more 
leisure for executive duties than can be secured 
by an American President. These old Japanese 
Shoguns, after taking from the Emperor all con- 
trol of his country, evolved another shrewdly 
practical device for simphfying lives of execu- 
tives. Yoshimitsu was but one of them to put 
the device into practice. He resigned his high 
office and took priestly vows, ostensibly retiring 
from the world, but in reality continuing to rule 
from within the seclusion of the garden about 
the Golden Pavihon as completely as while offi- 
cially the Shogun. The only difference was that 
he thus escaped innumerable official interviews 
and all the time-consuming red tape of bureau- 
cracy, and obtained leisure amidst thought- 



120 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

inspiring surroundings to work out his political 
plans and think over methods for their further- 
ance. He discarded the glittering husks of power 
and, undisturbed, enjoyed its sweet kernel. Ask 
any President or Governor or Mayor in the 
United States what this would mean for him! 
But of course there are two sides to every ques- 
tion. In a repubhc, although we like a boss, we 
regard with suspicion any Executive who se- 
cludes himself, for we believe it renders him self- 
opinionated, and finally autocratic. The rulers 
of Japan always have been frankly autocratic, 
so that, which with us is disapproved, there bears 
the stamp of ages-old public approval. 

A little later another great Japanese ruler, 
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, in like manner to Yoshi- 
mitsu, made the public gesture of retiring from 
official life without really relinquishing his power, 
and it is significant that he too chose a garden 
for that purpose — the delicious one of the Kodai- 
ji. The artist Kobori so planned it that when 
Hideyoshi sat of an evening upon the balcony 
of the building ceiled with decks from his war- 
junks that conquered Korea, he could indulge in 
the elegant pastime of looking out upon the moon 
with the Gwaryo-no-ike (or sleeping dragon 
pond) just at his left, and the twin Kame-no-ike 
and Tsuru-no-ike (turtle and stork ponds) on 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 121 

his right to aid in reflecting throughout the 
foliage the silvery rays of the moon. Just a 
little way down the hill is the modest dower house, 
Entoku-in, to which Yoshiko, Hideyoshi's widow, 
withdrew. It is provided with a small garden 
also designed by Kobori Enshu, and brought 
hither from Hideyoshi's estate at Momayama, 
outside Kyoto to the south. The artist has here 
worked out a half moon' effect, developing its 
graceful curve by three small stone bridges 
swung around through the foreground. Another 
of Hideyoshi's Momoyama gardens, one of the 
rare Sotetsu type, was so highly considered that 
long after his death a Tokugawa Shogun had it 
brought to Kyoto and presented it to the Nishi 
Hongwanji temple, where it is installed in the 
southeastern corner of the great enclosure. It 
is called Tokusui-in, and contains the "Pavil- 
ion of the Floating Clouds;" it is a garden whose 
charms do not reveal themselves until he who has 
looked out upon it follows the paths and pene- 
trates its loveliness. Perhaps it is to the thoughts 
born of Hideyoshi's love of gardens that we may 
ascribe the transformation that came about in 
him, for he who began as a rude warrior left be- 
hind him a wealth of art treasures created at his 
command that show his taste to have been eclectic. 
The world has probably never seen a more ruth- 



122 SOME OLD IC^OTO GARDENS 

less art collector, for after his conquest of Korea 
he was not content with bringing home all its 
art treasures as the spoil of his bow and spear, 
but also he carried over to Japan as enforced 
colonists whole villages of Korean artists and 
artisans, so that the arts and crafts of his home- 
land should be enriched by their skill and their 
traditions. 

The aesthetic enjoyment of moonhght by the 
medieval Japanese recalls a memorable evening 
spent upon the upper balcony of the Ginkaku-ji 
or Silver Pavilion looking down upon its ravish- 
ing garden done in 14<77 for Yoshimasa, last of 
the Ashikaga Shoguns, by Soami, that master 
of all the exquisite court refinements of the time. 
Take thought here for a moment that it was but 
shortly after the creation of this sylvan retreat, 
with all it meant of its epoch's highest culture, 
that Christopher Columbus was begging the ships 
necessary for the voyage to Zipangu (as Japan 
was then called). Soami's nature picture at the 
Silver Pavilion was so composed that by night, 
against the jet black background of the hill, one 
has in the right foreground the moon-reflecting 
pond, balanced by placing over against it, in the 
left upper middle-ground, two objects which by 
day seem meaningless — two oddly shaped flat- 
topped sand platforms, one about three feet high, 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 123 

with a surface as large as four or five billiard 
tables, and the other, somewhat higher, a trun- 
cated cone, so placed as to fit into a bay in the 
side of its larger companion. Upon the surface 
of the larger are incised geometric patterns. By 
moonlight one grasps at once their purpose and 
significance — ^the hard glittering surface of the 
white sand serves as an ideal reflector for the 
soft moonlight, diffusing from beneath the trees 
a weird unearthly light throughout the whole 
garden. Through the trees at the back winds a 
path whose white sand surface comes out strong- 
ly at night, and simulates the meandering river, 
such an admired feature in the pictures on the old 
fusuma and screens. Before the writer had en- 
joyed this entrancing glimpse into medieval 
artistic expression he was but an interested tour- 
ist in Kyoto, but then and there he fell head over 
heels in love with the ages-old tradition of the 
city and its lovely district. This transformation 
was aided by three temple acolytes serving cups 
of ceremonial tea, faintly frothing because 
brewed from whipped tea-powder and not leaves. 
In such scenes one easily becomes persuaded that 
tea has inspired more loveliness than opium-be- 
gotten dreams or the mental stimulus of alcohol. 
Sometimes tea has even exercised an influence 



124. SOME OLD ICYOTO GARDENS 

of international significance, — witness the inci- 
dent called "the Boston Tea Party!" 

In these and similar inspiring garden sur- 
roundings there developed a school of dilettanti 
devoting their lives to the refining of the akeady 
ultra-refined. They began with the everyday 
serving of tea, and from its homely details 
developed, step by step, the elaborations of the 
cha-no-yu, or tea ceremony, a thorough grasp of 
whose studied intricacies was required for the 
"compleat gentleman" of those early court 
circles. In this same garden stands the dainty 
tea-house built by Soami to launch his new idea 
of a room of only four and a half mat size — 
dimensions which those deep -thinking elegants 
considered perfection. You must know that al- 
ways in Japan a mat has measured six feet long 
by three wide, and always floor space has been 
described in terms of mats. Soami's four and a 
half mat dimensions allowed a half mat space in 
the centre for the necessary tea-making utensils, 
with the other four mats squared lengthwise about 
it for the devotees. "Now consider what thoughts 
were thus translated into things; a four and a 
half mat floor meant a square of nine feet. Three 
is the number denoting completeness because it 
contains the affirmative, the negative and the posi- 
tive, thus leaving nothing outside. Three times 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 125 

three, or nine, then spells a completed perfection, 
and when they gave the tea-house a height of 
nine feet, they gained a cubic capacity of nine in 
each of the three dimensions — a metaphysical 
result highly pleasing to their aesthetic appreci- 
ations. From this agreeable trifling with tea 
etiquette these early precieux passed on to num- 
erous other artificialities, such as competitions in 
poetizing, in flower arrangement or in classify- 
ing grades of incense by inhaling their perfumes, 
inventing scores of designs for stone lanterns, 
garden fences, etc. In short, exquisites like 
Yoshimasa, Soami, Rikyu and their ilk make the 
dainty efforts of Marie Antoinette and her circle 
at the Petit Trianon seem but boorish horseplay. 
It was in such diversions that Yoshimasa's life 
was spent, and so one readily understands why 
with him the power of the Ashikaga Shoguns 
went down in a glowing sunset of refined bril- 
liancy. 

The use of white sand in platforms or be- 
patterned lawn surfaces of modest dimensions 
is to be seen in other gardens of the old school, 
and we shall soon notice that the darker shadows 
that come with the moonlight give greater defi- 
niteness and value to the patterns incised upon 
the sand surfaces. This will be easily remarked 
in the Kobori Enshu gardens at the Konchi-in, 



126 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

called the Tsuru-Kame-no-Niwa or Crane and 
Tortoise garden, designed by order of the Toku- 
gawa Shogun lyeyasu, and also at the Tenju- 
an, a spot to be visited in the late afternoon when 
the westerly light picks out the hillock of stone 
lying at the back of the pond, hardly noticeable 
in the morning. The white sand parterre at 
Konchi-in represents a lake, and the rocks are 
arranged to make up the Chinese ideograph for 
"heart," a favorite symbol. Kobori Enshu was 
also the creator of the eight-windowed ceremonial 
tea-house to the right. Both these two delight- 
ful retreats lie close to the alluring Nanzenji 
demesne. 

At the Honen-in, a little further on along the 
hillsides toward the Ginkakuji, don't fail to skirt 
the buildings to the right, and you will be re- 
warded by coming upon the dearest little gar- 
den anywhere to be found. Its every detail is 
in reduced scale, but there are lacking none of 
the traditional features — ^pond, stream, path, 
bridges, rocks, trees, lanterns — all are here. But 
it is into the Nanzenji itself one must pene- 
trate for a sight of the furthest development, 
along ultra-aesthetic lines, of the sand garden in 
Kyoto. Here, seated upon the threshold of Kano 
Eitoku's Chinesey chef d'oeuvre of a room (24 
mats) we look out upon a small garden ninety 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 127 

feet broad by forty deep, backed by a wall. All 
that the unenlightened foreigner can see is a flat 
stretch of sand with no water at all, behind whose 
left two-thirds is a slight background of bushes, 
one small pine and several large rocks, while 
off in the right hand corner stands a clump 
of three shrubs. That is all, and yet to the 
artistically sensitive Japanese imagination we are 
gazing upon a spot where a tigress teaches her 
young to cross a stream! Lest some reader 
be hereby discouraged from visiting Kyoto 
gardens, we hasten to add that this is the only 
one which needs explanation to be pleasing. Out- 
side Kyoto to the northwest, at the Ryuan-ji 
temple there is a garden, called Taranoko Wat- 
ashi, even more esoteric. Soami did it, and upon 
a flat sanded space seventy by thirty feet with no 
water, grass, bushes or trees and no background 
but the wall, he has deftly stationed five groups 
of two or three stones each, none more than two 
feet high. To the cultured Japanese garden 
student this has for nearly five centuries satis- 
fyingly depicted the glories of the Inland Sea! 
Probably from no other garden in the world do 
its admirers (and it has many) draw so much 
of their satisfaction from mind and so little from 
matter. 



128 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

The Japanese hold that it requires more skill 
to conceal the artificiahty of a small garden than 
of a large one, but notwithstanding its difficulty, 
they are happier in the treatment of the former. 
A case in point is the large garden, called 
"Kikoku-tei" (Arbor of citrus fusca) given by 
Shogun lyemitsu in 1631 to the Higashi Hong- 
wanji temple. Its pond is so large as to be prac- 
ticable for boats, which pass around its gracefully 
disposed islands and under the picturesque 
bridges connecting them. But the scene, though 
undeniably pretty, is not Japanese, — it reminds 
one, instead, of the Kew Gardens, London. It 
is rather like a very pretty girl with nothing to 
say! 

As a rule, Japanese gardens, though compara- 
tively Hmited in extent, give a sm^prising illusion 
of size, generally produced by a depth dispro- 
portionate to the width. That at the Chishaku 
temple, across the street from the Imperial 
Museum, affords an interesting exception to this 
rule. Here Sen-no-Rikyu gets his effect of size 
not by depth in the middle, but by bringing in to- 
ward you at the centre a steep verdure-clad bank, 
and then swinging his right and left portions out 
and away. The result is as pleasing as it is effec- 
tive. We have here another unusual touch, — ^the 
pond gives off a stream from the left foreground 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 129 

which wanders around behind you between two 
temple buildings connected by arched bridges. 
It was in the agreeable retirement of the Chishaku 
compound that the Japanese, with understanding 
courtesy, confined the Russian Admiral taken at 
their great naval victory in Tsushima Straits. 

Rikyu's modest home still exists in the Kam- 
igyo quarter of Kyoto. It is set in so small an 
enclosure as would seem to preclude any garden, 
and yet within this narrow space, by means of 
the esoteric placing of stepping stones, a few 
trees, a bamboo gateway and a pair of cha-no-yu 
tea-houses, he contrived to portray a complete 
poetic pilgrimage. The taste of the time required 
a shallow garden to harmonize with the compact 
completeness of the house. There it all stands 
to-day just as he left it, except that it is now over- 
shadowed by a three hundred year old icho tree, 
which in his time was still in scale with the other 
miniature details. The stepping stones used here 
are of the type especially reserved for chaniwa 
or tea-house gardens. The larger one, cut like 
two steps, from which one mounts the wooden 
balcony, is of the form called "sword resting" 
because it served to remind the entering daimyo 
or samurai that swords were not allowed within 
an edifice devoted to the peaceful pastime of cha- 
no-yu, but must be left in the rack outside. 



130 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

Rikyu's house is now a shrine to his memory, 
and there students of the tea-ceremony daily burn 
incense before a carved wood portrait figure of 
him, obviously done with loving care by the great 
Hidari Jingoro, that lefthanded wizard of the 
chisel. Rikyu's life shows strange contrasts of 
fortune. The great Nobunaga gave him the title 
of Sosho, or Professor of the Elegant Arts, and 
though he also pleased Hideyoshi and became 
his teacher, that autocrat, in the end, turned 
against him, and ordered him to commit hara- 
kiri at the age of seventy-one. In the adjoin- 
ing house a lineal descendant of Rikyu's, Mr. 
Senke, practises the refined intricacies of the cha- 
no-yu. His performance for us of that time- 
honored ceremony was a poem of grace, dignity 
and tradition. Nothing could be defter than his 
every movement, especially the novel one to our 
eyes of whipping the tea powder with a fine bam- 
boo whisk into a frothy compound — a Chinese 
poet called it "Froth of the Liquid Jade!" Far 
back, in the time of the Tang Dynasty, tea came 
in cakes, and was boiled. Later, under the Sung 
Emperors, it was made into a powder, and 
whipped in hot water. Then the Mongolians in 
the thirteenth century overflowed China, sub- 
merging the Sungs and all their refinements, in- 
cluding tea etiquette. With the Ming Dynasty 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 131 

in the fifteenth century came in the now famil- 
iar method of preparing tea by steeping its leaves 
in hot water. The Japanese beat off the Mon- 
golian invasion in 1281, and thus in their tea cere- 
mony is preserved all the early tea-cult traditions 
of the Sung times, lost in China. It is difficult 
to imagine a more pleasing combination of 
thoughtful precision, deftness and grace, with 
never a wasted motion, than the exercise of this 
highly prized accomphshment displays to our 
modern eyes, whether performed by a successor 
of an ancient master in the old homestead, or in 
the Shinto Abbot's house at I^ikko before ad- 
mission to the lyeyasu Shrine's Holy of Holies, 
or when enjoying the benign hospitality of the 
Chief Abbot of the Buddhist monasteries on the 
secluded summit of lofty Koya San. Always 
it is a harmonious voice out of the distant past, — 
clear, complete and satisfying. 

One of the few really large gardens hereabouts 
is that of the Imperial palace of Shugaku-in 
which lies just outside the city to the northeast. 
Perched on a sloping hillside, its aspect is down- 
ward and outward instead of facing toward the 
customary background of trees. The pond here, 
named from its shape "The dragon," reaches al- 
most the proportions of a small lake, and looking 
off across it one sees the fertile plain backed by 



132 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

hill beyond hill standing like sentinels to guard 
the ancient capital. On the left, on the way down 
from this upper garden a path leads off to an en- 
closure devoted to the Empress. Here two bijou 
edifices, one a bit below the other, look out upon 
a rambling garden of four or five levels, each 
with its own pool, but all connected by the water- 
falls of a tiny rivulet. 

The highway from Shugaku-in leads on north- 
easterly over the narrowing plain to the mouth 
of the Ohara valley, up which a branch road 
winds between the crowding hills through de- 
lightful scenery to two rehgious estabhshments 
across the valley from each other ,-^the San- 
zen-in monastery, and the small convent of 
Jakko-in. At the monastery we shall find two 
gardens, a lower and an upper one, the former of 
the usual type but running deeply into the forest 
background, and the latter even more ancient 
and pleasing. It enjoys a more open treatment 
than is generally seen. One can look out some 
distance under the trees, and more freedom is 
displayed in placing the connected pools about 
in the open, without artificial settings around 
them. This garden yields the surprising thought 
that from the sound of its waterfalls and the wind 
through its trees was born a nation's music. Some 
one has said that if he might write the songs of 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 133 

a people he cared not who wrote its laws. What 
then shall be said of a garden whose sounds begot 
Japan's musicl But how? — it came about in this 
wise. iThe Japanese sage Dengyo Daishi, while 
pursuing his Buddhist studies in China, became 
enamored of their theory of music, and decided 
to introduce it at home. First he set about to 
find an environment similar to that of the Chinese 
monastejy where he studied. Here he found it, 
and here, late in the eighth century, he established 
his temple and its garden. Sitting there in medi- 
tation during many days, the melody of its water- 
falls and the wind overhead through the trees 
gradually took shape in his consciousness. Their 
harmony became so definite to his meditating 
senses that he set it down in musical notation, and 
of it formed the basis for Japan's music. Nor 
did there come from this garden nothing more 
practical than music. Among the store of learn- 
ing brought thither from China by this sage was 
a thorough knowledge of court etiquette. This 
he handed down to his successors here, with the 
result that they were long the arbiters of court 
ceremonials, the order of ofiicial precedence, etc. 
This control of social protocol at court meant 
poHtical power — a surprisingly practical product 
for a garden! The Jakko-in convent, snuggled 
into a recess in the hillside over against the San- 



134. SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

zen-in, is a pretty combination of many-stepped 
approach with a small and natural garden amid 
bungalows and shrines. 

One of Kyoto's many nature treats is a trip 
down the Hozu-gawa rapids which, for an hour 
and a half, take us through a winding cleft in 
the hills and end in the deservedly popular 
Arashiyama woodland park, famous for its 
cherry blossoms in early spring and its maple 
foliage in late November. If a feeble joke be 
permitted, these rapids have been shot so often 
that they are now nearly dead, but what one lacks 
in excitement is more than made up by hill and 
stream scenery, the plentiful bird life, and the 
constantly shifting views ahead and astern. The 
return to town can be made by train, but if one 
has a motor sent out it will be found waiting in 
front of the Tenryu-ji temple. Behind its living 
apartments, which are to the right, is a broad 
garden whose large pond runs well back into and 
under the tall trees forming the background. A 
small peninsula juts out to the left from the 
right foreground — a pretty touch. Soseki de- 
signed the garden in 1339 by order of Ashikaga 
Takau-ji, in memory of Emperor Godaigo. 

A few minutes beyond the Tenryu-ji is the 
Saga-no- Shaka-do, where dm-ing an impressive 
service a curtain rolls up back of the main altar 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 135 



and discloses a figure of Shaka brought here from 
China In 987. So lifelike is it that when he in 
person visited the temple the figure itself recog- 
nized him and walked down the steps to greet 
him! At the back of the temple lies an ample 
and open garden planned to display to best 
advantage the Benten-do, one of the loveliest 
creation^ of the Japanese woodcarver. Its small 
exterior bf warmly brown wood is smothered with 
chiselled detail. About ten minutes further on 
nearer town is the Ninna-ji temple lying to the 
left just inside the impressive entrance of the 
Omurogosho compound, whose wide sweep of 
steps are crowned at the top by another temple 
and a great pagoda, a landmark for miles around. 
The Ninna-ji is rich in the possession of two 
large gardens of the usual type, both weU worth 
seeing, but differing agreeably from each other. 
Here also are many storied screens, alluring 
for those interested in the country's history or 
painting. 

Another trip out of town, this time to the 
southeast, travels up and through a narrow pass, 
at whose further end there bursts upon us a 
glorious panorama of valley below and hills be- 
yond. We wind down the mountain road, per- 
haps stopping at its foot to see the once pretty 
but now rather neglected garden of the Konshu- 



136 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

ji, which has one of the largest ponds in the 
district. A httle further on comes the really sur- 
prising loveliness of the Sanbo-in (or Daigo-ji) 
garden. Here again we are indebted to Hide- 
yoshi's taste. The artistically stunted pine in 
the foreground has its foliage trained and 
trimmed into rounded tufts in the much admired 
Tamatsuri manner. There are many who credit 
this sequestered nook with more charm than any 
of its lovely sisters in and about Kyoto. Even 
the most meticulous critics can only comment that 
two of its turf-covered bridges are similar, thus 
contravening the strictest canons. For my part, 
he who sees anything but pleasing perfection in 
this spot should be classed with the Sybarite so 
sensitive that, recMning on a bed of rose-leaves, he 
complained that one of them was creased 1 These 
picturesque earth - topped bridges (called do- 
bashi) are not fanciful inventions to please the 
eye, but are frequent in Japan, where wooden 
viaducts covered with earth sometimes keep the 
traveller from noticing that his road has tempo- 
rarily left the solid ground. 

The most attractive garden bridge in Kyoto 
is undoubtedly the ancient stone one fetched 
from the old palace of Bishamon ' ( out on the 
Lake Biwa road) and..installed in the garden of 
the Senten Gosho^Ch Imperial Palace formerly 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 137 

used by the late Dowager Empress. Here, 
beneath a sheltering wistaria trellis, there spans 
the pond a quaint conceit in time-beautified stone. 
It is as if the verdant banks were connected by 
three junks, the bow of the first protruding be- 
yond the stern of the second, and it in turn 
beyond that of the third, and so on to the shore. 
It is as graceful as it is unusual, and quite in 
the early Chinese spirit, and therefore pleasing 
to the medieval Japanese aesthete. To one think- 
ing in this garden, this bridge of boats leads the 
mind on and out to the wide subject of ocean 
carriage, — to a merchant marine carrying across 
from home shores to foreign markets the exports 
whose expansion means so much to a nation's 
life. Japan, by a wise system of subsidies, has 
thus thrown bridges of modern ships from her 
factories across to distant purchasers, bringing 
back to her people in profits many times the 
taxes needed for the upbuilding subsidies, and 
besides providing well-paid employment for an 
increasing number of her workers both on land 
and on sea. 

In the Katsura summer palace garden, a chef 
d'oeuvre of Kobori Enshu, just outside Kyoto to 
the west, the artistic value of a junk is again in 
evidence. Protruding from the side of the palace 
balcony, out over the central pond is a narrow 



138 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

rectangular bamboo platform, simulating the bow 
of an ancient Chinese junk. From this, one may 
view the lovely garden picture spread broad and 
deep before him, as if, aboard the vessel, he were 
slowly forging out over the water. The pond's 
stillness seems to rebuke the tinkling waterfalls 
of rivulets strugghng down to the Nirvana of its 
calm repose. At a pleasing angle there runs out 
diagonally across the pond a long and graceful 
peninsula, reminiscent of the famous one at 
Amano-hashidate, one of the three "great sights" 
of Japan. Here and there upon rocky hillocks 
perch dainty tea-houses, each affording a differ- 
ent outlook on this morsel of man-made nature. 
The garden's legend is that of an old Chinese 
poem, well-known to all hterary Orientals. 

There are over nine hundred temples in Kyoto 
and many of them still possess gardens made for 
them in the middle ages. One might continue 
his rambles through them indefinitely, spelling 
out the thought of each one as he goes, and thus 
prolong the joys which a visit to Kyoto always 
means. But the two dozen that we have already 
visited are enough to reveal how highly the old 
Japanese valued thought, and the dignified 
nature setting he considered best suited to stimu- 
late the thought processes. It was matter ac- 
knowledging the supremacy of mind, but at the 



SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 139 

same time aiding it to its best. Each of us 
possesses a mental picture gallery of his own. 
Dame Fortune enables some to enrich theirs with 
memories of foreign scenes later to be enjoyed 
in leisure hours of tranquil retrospect at home. 
None is more fortunate than he who has thus 
hung this gallery with memories of certain old 
Kyoto gardens, seated before which, with all the 
world shut out, he may of an evening muse upon 
the beautiful thought there transmuted into 
things. Robert Browning re-created in "Love 
among the ruins," from a mere heap of stones, 
all the great pulsating activities of a long dead 
metropolis. These old Kyoto gardens are but 
mausolea in which lie enshrined the thought of 
the ages-old Japanese* culture and civilization. 
From them, if sharing Browning's constructive 
spirit, we can draw forth many a picture of the 
distant past. Yes, but what of the present and 
the future? Are not hints of their possibilities 
yielded to such a thinking people by the frequent 
garden waterfalls spelling water-power for mod- 
ern factories — and also from the old stone bridge 
under the Senten Gosho's wistaria — does it not 
suggest the Bridge of Boats to foreign markets 
which Japan's ships provide for her factories' 
products ? Should they not be a significant warn- 
ing to her mihtary party? For she has a strong 



140 SOME OLD KYOTO GARDENS 

military party, lineal descendants of the doughty 
Kumagaye, deeply intrenched in her political 
life, — strong in brains of the type that rendered 
Ulysses as potent in peace as in war ; — strong in 
the hearts of their countrymen, proud of the ac- 
quisition of Formosa, of Manchuria, of Korea; — 
strong with the powerful "yellow press." Will 
these militaristic politicians, blind to the fate of 
Prussia, persist in the Prussian path? — or will 
they moderate their ambitions, and, like Kuma- 
gaye Naozane, cast the sword of martial ag- 
gression into the pool at the heart of the garden 
enshrining the wise thought of ancient Japan? 



CHAPTER VI 

JAPANESE PILGRIMS AND THEIR PILGRIMAGES 

Writers upon the great war frequently al- 
leged that one of the chief causes for Germany's 
defeat was the inability of her military party to 
understand the psychology of other nations. A 
striking example of the differences between the 
German and the Allies' points of view found ex- 
pression in the Kaiser's conception of a Nation- 
alistic Gott: upon this we differed from him 
widely, and perhaps neither really understood 
the other. The religion of a people is so basic a 
fact that unless foreigners give it careful con- 
sideration they will fail to reach such complete 
understanding as alone affords sure foundation 
upon which to shape their foreign policy. Upon 
nothing are the Japanese and ourselves so far 
apart as upon this fundamental, and he who 
would seek to readjust our foreign policy in the 
Far East so that it shall accord with existing 
conditions and therefore lead toward practical 
results, will do well to consider tendencies of 

141 



1421 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

religious tKought to-day evidenced in the Island 
Kingdom. 

Religion is, as one Latin derivation indicates 
(religo, I tie back), an attempt to tie back to the 
Great First Cause, an effort which every people 
in the world evidences in its forms of worship, for 
none is without worship. All races have every- 
where and always given this recognition to that 
fundamental fact of Creation, — the certain ex- 
istence of a Creating Force, which they admit 
to be greater for good or evil than any other they 
know. We are interested in power around the 
Pacific Ocean — poHtical power, of course, whose 
control lies in the hands of the Japanese and the 
Anglo-Saxons of the United States, Great Brit- 
ain, Australia and Canada. A Divine Power 
House is recognized in the religions of all of them, 
so we must give consideration to the rehgion 
of the Japanese — to some account of how they 
are attempting to connect with that Great Power 
House, as it is given them to see it. And at the 
very beginning of these comments upon their 
religious systems, let the writer go on record as 
believing that although the Japanese Way is not 
so good as that enjoyed by Christian nations of 
the Occident, nevertheless Japan of to-day is 
trying harder, both by ancestral shrines in every 
home, and by frequent attendance at numerous 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 143 

temples and outdoor shrines, to better its con- 
nection with the Divine Power House, than are 
smug Christians in other lands, contented with 
an hour's devotion in church upon one day in the 
week, if indeed so much time as that be given to 
thought of the things spiritual controUing the 
material, to which latter our lives are so com- 
pletely devoted. Going west across the Pacific, 
one drops a day out of his calendar upon reach- 
ing the 180th meridian gf longitude. It so 
happened that Sunday was the day we lost, and 
that started me thinking upon what would be left 
of Christian attendance upon divine service if 
Sunday were dropped out and only week-day at- 
tendance be counted. We have fallen far below 
our forefathers in interest in and thought upon 
matters divine, but not so Japan, for there the 
two great faiths of Shinto and Buddhism are 
flourishing as never before, especially the former, 
their indigenous faith. Even Buddhism is put- 
ting on new attributes by adding belief in an in- 
dividual future state to their original teachings 
from India via China, and by launching out into 
such modern manifestations as Sunday schools, 
summer schools, young men's associations, wom- 
en's societies, street preaching and deliberate 
missionary effort abroad. 

The great temple of Higashi Hongwanji in 



144. JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

Kyoto was built in 1895 at a cost of four million 
dollars. To raise its bulky timbers into place 
twenty huge hawsers were needed, and to make 
those cables, some of them two hundred feet long 
and sixteen inches around, thousands of women 
cut off their hair and sent it to Kyoto. A great 
coil of this cable still remains on view in the 
temple, a mute answer to those who allege that 
modern Japan is losing interest in rehgioni 

Let us visit some of their holiest places and see 
for ourselves how the rehgious feeling of that re- 
markable people is evidencing itself. In the year 
804, the then Emperor sent two very wise priests, 
Kobo Daishi and Dengyo Daishi, to study 
Buddhism in China, so that they might bring 
home the best of its teachings. It was then that 
the Japanese were thirstily absorbing all the best 
that Chinese civilization had to teach, just as 
recently, during the last half century, they have 
seized upon everything niodern worth learning 
in the Occident. They are great learners, the 
Japanese, — a most enriching trait for a people 
to possess. Dengyo Daishi came home after one 
year and founded the Tendai sect of Buddhism 
with headquarters on Mount Hiei, close by 
Kyoto, the home of the Emperors. But that 
ampler student, Kobo Daishi, one of the world's 
great men, and founder of the Shingon sect, after 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 145 

two years in China, sought and found at home 
a retreat far from the seat of political power, a 
mountain in the distant province of Kii, Koya 
San, upon whose flattened summit, four thousand 
feet above the sea, he had remarked eight hillocks, 
naturally corresponding to the eight leaves of the 
sacred lotus (unfolded to the student, closed to 
the unenlightened) and to the eight spokes of the 
Buddhist Wheel of the Law, "upon which each 
human is bound until he obtains blessed release." 
Here, upon this secluded mountain retreat, he 
established a monastery, and here after an 
abundantly useful life, spent in writing, teaching, 
painting, sculpture, road building and spreading 
industrial arts in many parts of his beloved 
country, he lies buried, so here is the holiest spot 
in all Japan for those who believe as he did, and 
many another beside. Mount Koya has ever 
since his death in 835 A. D. borne his monastery 
and others added thereto, and around about his 
grave has, during the centuries, grown up a vast 
cemetery, the Westminster Abbey of Japan, 
where lie buried hundreds of her greatest and 
best beneath the shade of huge cryptomeria trees. 
To appreciate what burial in this sacred spot 
means to a Japanese, one should have prepared 
his spirit by toiling up the long eight mile incline 
the day before and slept within the solemn 



146 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

monastic precincts of the Shojo Shin-in or Pure- 
hearted Temple. Then rising before the sun, 
take respectful part in the daybreak service of 
the monks, and thereafter go forth in the fresh- 
ness of the new day, reverently to walk through 
the mile and a half of age-softened monuments 
under the shafts of hght piercing down through 
the cryptomeria fohage as they do through the 
windows of an ancient cathedral. Just before 
the tomb of the sage Kobo Daishi stands the Hall 
of the Ten Thousand Lights. Here burns a 
lamp which he lighted and which during all the 
eleven centuries since then has never been ex- 
tinguished. About it burn hundreds of other 
lights in splendid lanterns given by great men 
of the past vastly honored by the privilege of 
presenting them to so holy a place. When you 
have thus reached the tomb of this great and 
good man, with spirit prepared by the reveren- 
tial manner of your coming, you will understand 
why all the long eight miles of the steep tilted 
roadway was, and always is, thronged with 
pilgrims, and why its woodland banks were 
stuck thick with milhons of prayers on bits of 
white paper. Here you are very close to the heart 
of old Japan, which beats as strongly under its 
new modernity as ever it did. Upon lofty Koya 
San the ancient spirit of Japan is lifted up into 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 147 

a high place, and the thinking and observing 
foreigner must needs be lifted up along with it, 
and join in the elevation of the place. 

There are many religious houses here, but no 
inns or hostelries for the pubHc, so each pilgrim 
must lodge in one of these homes of religious 
thought, and therefore partake of the spirit there 
abiding. And that spirit cannot but be renewed 
and strengthened by this constant flowing back 
to the heart of the nation's best blood purified 
by the religious purpose actuating each pilgrim's 
visit. In sundry of these buildings are preserved 
art treasures accumulating ever since the days 
when Kobo Daishi, the great founder, brought 
thither much of the best obtainable in the then 
unrifled China, many of them presents from the 
Chinese Emperor of that day. After the privi- 
lege of viewing this ancient collection, the writer 
was taken to the Buddhist Theological College, 
where he faced six hundred earnest young 
students devoting their lives to the learning and 
the teaching of the Way as Buddha saw it. Here 
as elsewhere throughout Japan one notices that 
the faces of the priests have none of that cunning 
slyness which the word priestcraft has come to 
convey to the modern mind. Serious, thought- 
ful and frank is the expression one sees upon the 
countenance of Japanese priesthood. If anyone 



148 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

tells you that Buddhism is not a living active force 
in the Japan of to-day, let himi visit Koya San, 
and two of the most interesting days of his life 
vs^ill ever after remind him of the pulsating vigor 
of faith he there witnessed. 

The traveller will remark that always some- 
where about the enclosure of a Japanese Buddhist 
temple there will be a Shinto shrine, so blended 
have these two faiths become. He will find this 
true at that great pilgrimage centre, Nikko, 
where stand the two gorgeous groups of mau- 
solea entombing the mortal remains and the more 
than mortal memories of two great Shoguns of 
the Tokugawa family, lyeyasu and lyemitsu. 
If the traveller is minded to indulge himself in 
the fullest aesthetic preparation for the treat to 
the senses which Nikko affords, then let him 
desert that modern convenience, the railway train, 
twenty-five miles before reaching the town. Here 
begins the splendid avenue of tall cryptomeria 
trees, planted over three hundred years ago to 
guide the pilgrim to the shrines. Up through 
these impressive rows of silent guardians of 
memoty one proceeds, as* for centuries countless 
feet of pilgrims have trod. At last, passing 
through the small town you come to the mountain 
torrent, lashing its way down from the everlast- 
ing hills above, but crossed by the sacred bridge 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 149 

of red lacquer, whose origin is lost in ancient 
mythology. It and its woodland background 
find frequent echo in many a copy throughout 
the land. And above, on the slopes of the pine 
clad hillside await you two great series of build- 
ings, stationed upon terrace above terrace, the 
better to display their gorgeous color and detail 
of carving that grow ever more bewilderingly 
entrancing until each culminates at the top in its 
Honden, or Holy of Holies. One is in charge 
of a Buddhist Abbot and the other of a Shinto 
one, so an even balance between those faiths is 
here observed. The mausolea of lyeyasu are 
somewhat the finer of the two, and here Shinto 
prevails, but those of lyemitsu, with their Bud- 
dhist ritual, are almost equally fascinating and 
surprising. Here we have flat color in its great- 
est glory, enhanced by gilding and carving in 
profusion, giving the- sparkling effect one expects 
from jewels. It is flat color's nearest approach 
anywhere in the world to the brilliance of that 
light-pierced glory which stained glass alone 
enjoys. Not the sombre glitter of the glass at 
Chartres or in the Lower Church at Assisi, nor 
yet the quiet glow seen at Gloucester Cathedral or 
Fairford Church in England, or Conches in N^or- 
mandy, or that so frequent in Troyes or Rouen, 
but rather the brilliancy of Arezzo or Erfurt. 



150 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

We spent two weeks at Nikko, and always, dur- 
ing our long visits to the temples at all hours of 
the day, there came mounting ever the uninter- 
rupted stream of pilgrims in large or small bands 
or singly, — devout, serious and deeply interested 
in their purpose. Service after service was per- 
formed for them, with always more waiting to 
fill their places at the next one. We were privi- 
leged to visit the Holy of Holies of the lyeyasu 
shrine and within its gloomj saw hidden away 
art treasures of sculpture and painting whose 
hues, undimmed through long years, show a 
brilliance no where else surpassed. 

As at the two mausolea of Nikko, so in Kyoto, 
the Rome of Japan, with its more than nine 
hundred temples and shrines. Buddhism and 
Shinto go hand in hand, both commanding that 
same devotion which strikes the traveller inces- 
santly throughout the land. So great is the 
contrast between the brilliant hues of Nikko and 
the quieter beauty of Kyoto with its lower tones 
and charm of form rather than of color, that one 
should visit the latter first, lest the gorgeousness 
of the former jade your palate for the less highly 
spiced delights of the latter. The Japanese have 
a proverb "Never say 'splendid' until after seeing 
Nikko," and they are quite right, so see it last, 
unless your Kyoto stay can be long enough to 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 151 

acclimatize your aesthetic perceptions to its lower 
altitudes. Nikko is a small Venice or Florence, 
brilliant, vibrant, entrancing, — but Kyoto is a 
prototype of great, quietly compelling Rome. 

Before leaving Buddhism with its many sects 
and turning to Shinto, reference must be made 
to the great bronze statue of Buddha, erected at 
Kamakura in 1252 and called the Daibutsu. 
Although seated, it is over 49 feet tall, which is 
exceeded by the stiU larger Buddha at Nara, 
dating from 749, and 53% feet in height. The 
Nara Buddha has nothing to commend it but 
antiquity and size. How different is the Dai- 
butsu at Kamakura! Anyone who has looked 
upon that countenance of calm meditation, 
accentuated by the thoughtful poise of its head 
and shoulders, has received a sensation, a con- 
vincing impression, which will stay with him 
throughout life. Nowhere has human genius so 
successfully depicted thought by matter. As you 
look up at the Meditating One, not only do you 
actually feel the thought there incarnate, but also 
do you realize that it is at the same time a power- 
ful and a healing thought — thinking for others 
by one who, as their holy writings declare, vowed 
that "perfect bhss He would not have till He 
knew that all who would invoke Him might be 
saved." Those who have been privileged to look 



152 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

upon this, one of the world's most expressive 
monuments, will readily understand the numbers 
of the pilgrims that continually throng thither 
seeking the inspiration of this great thinking 
beneficence. 

But the most popular faith of all to the Japa- 
nese is the only one which is really indigenous, 
Shinto. It has thirteen recognized sects, but its 
chief division is into State Shinto under the 
Governmjent's Bureau of Shrines, and Popular 
Shinto, which, like Buddhism and Christianity 
is supervised by the Bureau of Religions. Con- 
fucianism, although it has quite a following, is 
among the Japanese considered merely an ad- 
mirable code of ethics. Shinto was originally a 
form of nature worship, to which there was later 
added the worship of a long series of deified men. 
Unlike Buddhism with its many saints. Pure 
Shinto has no images, and within the holiest part 
of its shrines one sees nothing but a mirror. This 
mirror is not worshipped, but is "typical of the 
human heart which in its purity reflects the image 
of Deity," so the worshippers bow before it in 
self-examination. According to the official rec- 
ords this faith has over 200,000 shrines, and yet 
it is not really a religion, and is without a creed. 
Its main service is to foster patriotism by main- 
taining shrines for the worship of the Imperial 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 153 

ancestors and of men who have notably served 
the nation during their lives. This is the Japa- 
nese point of view, but to the foreign observer its 
great value seems to be its insistence upon 
personal cleanliness and simplicity of life. It is 
the cause of the Japanese being the cleanest 
people in the world ; think of a land where even 
the poorest coolie takes a hot bath every day ! In 
these days of extravagance the world over, and 
that too in spite of our international enemy. 
High Cost of Living, what a national asset is a 
faith like Shinto, which commends and requires 
simplicity of hfe! 

The greatest of all the Shinto shrines are 
those of Ise at Yamada, and yet nothing could 
be simpler than the purity of their architectural 
lines or the unpainted wood of their construc- 
tion. An account of one of the ceremonials 
there will give the reader some idea of how 
stringent are the Shinto rules regarding clean- 
liness. Sea salt is much used for purification at 
their shrines, and that needed for those of Ise is 
procured in the following manner: Certain fish- 
ermen are selected and are made ready for their 
sacred task by cleanly living and by bathing. 
The last day of the old year they are dressed in 
new white cotton garments and are provided with 
a clean new boat, all of whose fittings, sails, oars. 



154j JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

etc., are equally new, and thus equipped, they 
put out to sea after nightfall to await the dawn 
of the new year. When the first rays of the sun 
appear above the ocean horizon, the fishermen 
begin to dip up the salt water with which to fill 
the carefully purified tank on their vessel. This 
boatload is brought back to the land where, upon 
a sandy beach beneath wind swept pine trees, the 
water is boiled until nothing remains but its salt. 
Fire is purifying, but that used for this ceremony 
must be essentially so, so neither coal nor wood 
are used, but only new rice hay and clean pine- 
needles. Then there is built on the beach beneath 
the protecting pines a shelter for this salt, where 
under a roof thatched with clean new rice straw, 
it is kept pure by the winds of heaven until from 
time to time it shall be required in some ceremo- 
nial. When it is used the officiating priest must 
tie a clean white cloth across his mouth lest the 
human breath pollute this super-cleansed salt. 
■N"or must he in any ceremony blow out any light, 
for fire is purity and his breath is not. Every 
Shinto temple and shrine must be pulled down 
and rebuilt every twenty years, thus ensuring 
cleanhness and also removing temptation to 
over-expenditure in their construction. 

Because Shinto is so greatly concerned with 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 155 

reverence for the Imperial ancestors and the 
support of a dynasty which has uninterruptedly 
occupied the throne for over twenty-five centu- 
ries, it seems to me that its essence is best seen 
and felt during a visit to the tomb of the late 
Mikado, one of the greatest of his line, at 
Momoyama, outside Kyoto. That visit was for 
me one of the most impressive experiences of my 
life. Momoyama symbolizes magnificent sim- 
plicity. Permission for the visit was accorded by 
the Minister of the Imperial Household. The 
grounds are extensive and lie upon the gentle 
slope of a hill, and their only decoration is pine 
trees among which run heavily gravelled paths. 
My wife, little son and I were met by a guardian 
who conducted us first to the official register 
where each must set down his name, etc. Then, 
having been joined by two attendants, he led us 
toward the wide enclosure which separates the 
tomb from the public who daily throng here to 
offer homage. Just outside the enclosure we 
were stopped before a large stone basin, where 
with a new wooden ladle, water was dipped for 
us to wash our hands and mouths, which we dried 
on paper napkins, later handed to the attendants 
to be destroyed. Then we were taken into and 
across the enclosure to a gate on the opposite 
side, over which was a Pure Shinto torii, known 



156 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

by its horizontal bars, severely straight and not 
slightly upturned at the ends as are those of 
Mixed Shinto torii. The gate was opened and 
disclosed a stone pathway about a hundred yards 
long leading up to the tomb. At the pathway's 
end, on a small easel of green bamboo rods, stood 
the wreath we had brought and which had been 
taken from us on our arrival. Between the gate- 
way and the tomb, equal distances apart, were 
laid upon the pathway straw prayer mats, and 
by each a label in Japanese indicating the rank 
of those by whom they were to be used. We were 
honored by being escorted to the third or furthest 
one, reserved for those who are or were of 
ambassadorial rank. Then the guardians with- 
drew. And the tomb! what does the reader 
imagine concerning the magnificence of the final 
resting place of one whose people during his long 
and beneficent reign emerged from medievalism 
and advanced to such grasp of modernity as to 
become one of the great powers instead of a her- 
mit kingdom. The tomb is but a simple mound 
of small round stones; — but such a mound and 
of such simplicity! — three million stones in one 
great heap, whose gracefully curved outline is 
broken once to avoid monotony of design. These 
stones were selected with the greatest care, each 
being passed through the same bamboo ring to 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 157 

ensure uniforiri size. Could anything be more 
simple in its taste, and yet where is there a monu- 
ment more impressive? According to custom, we 
retired backward, and after leaving the enclosure 
were taken a few hundred yards further on to 
where the Empress lies buried beneath a similar 
but much smaller mound. Lower down the hill 
in this same park, there also lies buried that fine 
old veteran. General Nogi, the conqueror of Port 
Arthur in the Russian War. So grief -stricken 
was he by the death of his beloved master, the 
Emperor, that the night of the Imperial funeral, 
he and his aged wife, after ceremonial prepara- 
tion, committed suicide by hara-kiri, so here they 
both lie, below the Imperial tombs, guarding as 
faithfully after death, as in life the great Gen- 
eral had served. This act was an evidence of 
wh^t the Japanese call Chugi or loyalty, and be- 
cause this is one of the fundamental tenets of 
Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism alike, it is 
taught every Japanese from boyhood, and is the 
great outstanding feature of the nation's faith. 

The shrine at which more incense is burnt than 
any other in the land is that in the outskirts of 
Tokyo, dedicated to the Forty-seven Ronins. 
The chauffeur of our motor had told me much of 
his conversion to Christianity, and of his atten- 
dance upon Methodist church, Sunday school and 



158 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

night school, but I noticed that when he thought 
himself unobserved, he quietly bought a bundle 
of joss sticks and set them afire before the tomb 
of the Master of the Ronins. The daimyo whom 
these brave fellows served had been treacherously 
done to death by a rival daimyo, so these loyal 
retainers swore to avenge him. This became 
known, and as a result, so many precautions 
were taken that it long seemed impossible for 
them to reach their intended victim. They had 
to resort to all sorts of extreme measures to aUaj'- 
suspicions of their purpose and thus make pos- 
sible its achievement. Their leader took to a 
dissolute life, put away his wife and seemingly 
sunk to the gutter. At last, so unworthy and 
negligible had they become that vigilance was 
relaxed, and then they struck 1 They cut off 
their victim's head, washed it in a well and of- 
fered it at the tomb of the master to whom they 
had been so loyal. This done, they gave them- 
selves up to the authorities, and all at the same 
time committed suicide by hara-kiri to expiate 
their criminal act. Their ancient story, ever 
new, is early told every Japanese child, and 
continues a vigorous inspiration to the national 
spirit of loyalty. 

It is appropriate that we close these comments 
upon Japanese faith by reference to its most 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 159 

intimate feature, the ancestral shrines in the 
homes. In Buddhist families they are to be found 
in the living room of the house, but in the Shinto 
ones generally in the kitchen, which should be 
the cleanest part of all indoors. Before these 
shrines are set flowers or offerings of food, and 
here is celebrated respectful adoration of one's 
forebears. A Japanese does not know a mono- 
theistic God as we do. He worships forces of 
nature, or deified human beings, and among 
these, of course, his own progenitors. A home 
with some kind of daily worship is better than one 
without any. There is no denying, even among 
its severest critics, that ancestor worship thus 
brings into every home a daily reminder of things 
spiritual, a constant touch with that beyond the 
veil, on the hither side of which are the material 
things cognized by the senses. Henry Adams, 
in his remarkable autobiography caUed "The 
Education of Hemy Adams," devotes a chapter 
to proving that the world's history should be 
divided into only two epochs, that before and 
that after 1893, when the discovery of the X-ray 
and of radio-activity revealed the existence of 
the Fourth Dimension of things and facts be- 
yond the ken of the five senses — a supersensual 
world. The ancestral shrines in every Japanese 
home have long been constant reminders of this 



160 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

fact to that medley of spiritual enlightenment 
and obtuseness, the Japanese people. 

If the ability to move bodies through space is 
a satisfying evidence of power, then the pilgrim- 
ages of the Japanese show amazing strength in 
their religious faiths. Nothing like them has been 
seen since the famous pilgrimages of the middle 
ages in Europe, when we read of a hundred 
thousand pilgrims visiting Canterbury on the 
same day, or of overcrowding at other holy places 
by men from near and far seeking salvation. 
Indeed, the figures of these Japanese pilgrimages 
exceed anything which the history of any age 
records of such acts of faith. On New Year's 
Day, 1920, over 300,000 devotees repaired for 
worship to the Kawasaki Daishi shrine just out- 
side Tokyo. Nor are these pilgrimages restricted 
to any one day in the year. A leading American 
missionary who has lived in Japan more than 
thirty years told me that so full and constant was 
the stream of pilgrims daily visiting the Kompira 
shrine at Kotohira on the lovely Inland Sea, that 
their annual total exceeded three million. Almost 
as great is the attendance at that most ancient 
fane of Izumo-no 0-yashiro at Kizuki, whose 
Chief Priest is said to be the 82nd in his dynasty 
of pontiffs. Another American missionary who 
had lived two years near the greatly venerated 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 161 

Ise shrines at Yamada said that the railway trains 
used to bring thither ten thousand worshippers 
a day. The steep and long road to the 4000 feet 
elevation of Koya San's summit is as crowded as 
a city street all day and every day, an ever com- 
ing and going throng of devout, earnest faces, 
laboriously toiling upward regardless of ad- 
vanced age or physical infirmity, or descending 
with the contented sense of religious accomplish- 
ment. Every mountain has a shrine at its top, 
so up every mountain climb devout men, demon- 
strating by that effort their acknowledgement of 
the ascendency belonging to' the spiritual over the 
material. After witnessing such constant and 
ample exhibitions of behef in that beyond the ken 
of our physical senses, the American traveller 
cannot but feel that the Japanese as a nation 
show a higher appreciation than do we of the 
great fact that this hfe is but a preparatory 
school for another one beyond. 

My conclusions are that the Japanese, with 
-^religious faith less helpful than Christianity, are 
making better and more constant use of their out- 
look upon spirituality than are we of ours. And 
meanwhile, what are they thinking of our Chris- 
tianity? They are shrewd observers and there- 
fore we may learn something useful by consider- 
ing their point of view. We went to see Amano- 



162 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

Hashidate, that beautiful freak of nature, where 
across a lake (really an estuary) surrounded by 
hills, runs diagonally a narrow causeway of sand 
shaded by pine trees. We were accompanied by 
a highly intelligent Japanese gentleman, espe- 
cially learned in Buddhist and Shinto lore, and 
with him talked for the better part of two days 
upon those subjects, and especially of his con- 
clusions concerning Christianity. From him and 
from other thoughtful Japanese came surprising 
comments upon our religions. "You call our 
Buddhism idolatrous," say they. "Perhaps it is 
among the poorly educated, who cannot grasp 
its higher philosophy, but in many of your 
churches, especially in Europe, we not only see 
as many or more images, but we find that the 
people pray to these saints, as you call them, and 
not directly to the Great Creator, just as our 
people do. We see votive tablets in many Euro- 
pean churches thanking certain saints for suc- 
cessful passing of school examinations and other 
favors, just as among us. Furthermore, partic- 
ularly in the Latin countries of Europe, your 
saintly images are more frequently borne in out- 
door processions through the streets than are ours 
in Japan. As for your Protestant Christianity, 
strongest in the United States, the slackness of 
its worship makes it seem to us to approximate 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 163 

our Confucianism, to have degenerated into a 
mere code of ethics, — nothing but rules for good 
behavior." 

Many of these Japanese know our Scrip- 
tures, and they seem struck with the fact that 
while the Gospels record that Christ healed 
nearly three times oftener than he preached, and 
also taught his disciples spiritually to efface dis- 
ease and even death, modern Christianity is so 
stripped of spirituality that both in its teachings 
and practice it ignores His lessons of healing, 
and uses materia medica, which He and His never 
did. "Why do you call our religions unspirit- 
ual," said these Japanese, "when you have delib- 
erately turned your back on the chief spiritual 
manifestation of your Master's life? You are 
altruistic and charitable, which is mere Confu- 
cianism; — but spiritual in the sense of the Gos- 
pel's and of Paul's teachings and acts of spirit- 
ual imderstanding controlling things material 
you certainly are not, and that too of your 
own dehberate choosing." Are they right or 
are they not? Is or is not our modern Chris- 
tianity denatured of its spiritual understandilig 
of the world as it is instead of as it seems to 
be? Are or are we not content to remain m 
snug (or smug!) harbor, sheltered behind the 
breakwaters of the five senses, reluctant to 



164 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

fare forth upon the ocean of the Fourth Dimen- 
sion, as becomes those living in what Henry 
Adams styled the Supersensual epoch? If he is 
right, are we keeping abreast of our own times? 
Perhaps a stay of some months in Japan may 
arouse thoughts tending to better the Christianity 
of a man who goes there as a student, and not as 
one boastful of western civilization. Why is not 
Christianity succeeding there better than it is? 
The Japanese are quick to recognize and acquire 
factors of strength in our civilization — isn't our 
religious faith strong enough to attract them? — 
is it as powerful as it used to be when it started 
in the Orient? Why is it that a rehgion owing 
its origin to a Teacher born amid an Oriental 
people has been taken over and organized by 
Occidentals who have so remodelled it that it does 
not now succeed with the very races among which 
it was born? Has it been so over-organized by 
the materialistic Occidental that it cannot appeal 
to the more spiritual Oriental? The latter's ad- 
mission of the superiority of mind over matter 
prepares him to accept the teachings of Him who 
healed by spirit and not by material means. 
What is wrong? Have we removed the very 
feature of Christianity that would have recom- 
mended it to the Oriental? Have we too closely 
followed Constantine and made our church 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 165 

material instead of spiritual, just as he did by- 
stopping its persecutions, and making it the 
fashion? He substituted an established Church, 
with all that means of material power, for the 
spiritual power it owed to the blood of its early 
martyrs; — are we doing the same? 

Occidentals say that the Japanese have too 
much conceit, not only about their land, but also 
its customs, religions, and government. Don't 
we need a little more conceit of the right sort — 
of that higher type which spells loyalty, so vital 
a factor in Japanese life — outspoken loyalty to 
our real selves, to God as he truly is, to govern- 
ment as it should be conducted? And loyalty 
must be learned in small things before it can be 
practised in the greater ones — it should begin at 
home, as charity does and as it does in Japan. At 
Yale, our best song runs, "For God, For Country 
and For Yale," and we learned its meaning by 
an intense class loyalty which served as a foun- 
dation for loyalty to university, which, in turn, 
taught the higher one to country, and the highest 
of all, to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe. "A 
narrow beginning" you say? — and best so. I 
know Yale is better than Harvard, but have no 
respect for a Harvard man who agrees thereon. 
If that is narrow, then long live that sort of honest 
narrowness! Let us be frankly partisan in our 



166 JAPANESE PILGRIMS 

additions, but judicial in our divisions, and 
Christian in our subtractions from what those 
additions and divisions have gained us. The Jap- 
anese is right in his intense loyalty to his land and 
its institutions. Let us be equally partisan in our 
lireparedness, military and otherwise, to resist 
aggression from without, because this makes for 
national self-respect, without which no people can 
endm-e. Let us be judicial in our application of 
that preparedness to external problems, and then, 
best of all, be Christian in the day of victory, as 
we have recently been. 

A Far Eastern policy, carefully thought out 
along such lines, will endure and prosper. 

Japan is showing wider participation by in- 
dividuals in her national faiths than we in ours; 
theirs must be yielding them returns or their 
participation would not persist and grow. And 
yet it lacks altruism as we understand the word. 
They are kindly each to the other and also to out- 
siders, but their faith is an individualistic seek- 
ing for betterment and it demands results. Es- 
pecially is this true when that faith expresses 
itself nationally. They cannot understand how 
the United States, after sustaining over 400,000 
casualties (about their own total in the Russian 
war) and expending 31 billion dollars, neither 
demanded nor received in the day of victory any 



JAPANESE PILGRIMS 167 

financial or territorial recompense whatever. 
And yet, to our way of thinking, educated for 
generations in Christianity, this national policy 
of ours was but natural. It is from acts charac- 
terized by such spirit that a nation gains its great- 
est power. A people that spontaneously and 
unanimously acts thus in a great national crisis 
sui'ely may be said to possess a soul less material 
than that of those interested in the spoils of 
victory; it can be trusted in the formulation 
of its foreign policy. And the less material a 
nation's soul the closer is its connection with the 
Great Power House, our complete allegiance to 
which is acknowledged by our Declaration of 
Independence. 



CHAPTER VII 

SHANTUNG AND KOREA YEESUS THE WHITE PERIL 

That extraordinary Venetian, Marco Polo, 
who returned home from "Far Cathay" in 1292 
after a sojourn there of nearly two decades, 
amazed Europe for many a long day by his ac- 
count of the wonders of the Far East. His 
alluring statements concerning Zipangu, later 
called Japan, were destined to produce striking 
results. Marco Polo died in 1324, and more than 
a century and a half afterward, one of his read- 
ers, also an Italian, inspired by his narrative and 
by other stories to win sight of glorious Zipangu, 
resolutely set his face against all accepted geo- 
graphical beliefs and sailed for the fabled island 
in a westward direction instead of following the 
eastward path of the earHer adventurer. This 
later Italian (his name was Christopher Colum- 
bus) by his epoch-making voyage toward Zi- 
pangu transformed the earth from a flat plain 
into a globe. He did more — his addition of the 
twa new continents to the known world led the 
way to the white man's overrunning the earth. 

168 



THE WHITE PERIL 169 

Columbus died ignorant that he had discovered 
a new hemisphere, but beheving he had found 
lands near to the Zipangu he so earnestly longed 
to see. Never since his successful venture has the 
relentless expansion of the white man's dominion 
ceased. Nor has he been contented to expand 
until his flags covered not only the two American 
continents, but also those of Africa and Aus- 
traha, as well as most of the "isles of the seas." 
Equally persistent has been his enthusiasm for ac- 
quiring Asian territory. Russia pushed steadily 
across its northern half until the Pacific Ocean 
alone checked her eastward march, and then turn- 
ing southeasterly she swung downward through 
Manchuria until she reached the Gulf of Chihli 
and the Yellow Sea, and was firmly seated at 
Port Arthur, which she turned into the Gibraltar 
of the East. Meanwhile in southern Asia, Eng- 
land had taken aU the great territories of India, 
and then, for elbow room, had spread west and 
east and northeast, reaching out along the Malay 
Straits, Singapore way, and over the lofty 
Himalayas into Thibet. East of her France 
took a huge piece of China, — Tonkin, with its 
eighty millions of Chinese inhabitants. The 
English, by formal notice, warned all other 
powers out of that central and best portion of 
China loosely called the Yangtse Valley. The 



170 THE WHITE PERIL 

French issued a similar tabu notice covering all 
Chinese territory south of the Yangtse Valley. 
The Russians took even stronger steps through- 
out Manchuria and Mongolia, so that when the 
Germans raised their standard over Shantung, 
the white races had omitted little of Asia except 
the province of Chihli, around Peking, in which 
city their armed Legation guards dominated 
that neighborhood. 

Now let us suppose the reader to be an inter- 
ested Japanese geographer, wonderingly observ- 
ing these advancing waves of the White Peril, 
ever approaching nearer and nearer to his island 
home off the Asian coast. Assume that, being 
such an observer, he is as patriotic and intelli- 
gent as the average American would be under 
similar circumstances. What would he think? — - 
silently at first, until such time as his growing 
exasperation made him burst into action at see- 
ing these white men from far-off Europe, not 
content with annexing all the rest of the world, 
finally engaged in absorbing the nearby lands of 
his (the Japanese's) neighbor and fellow Ori- 
ental, China. Of all these Occidental invaders 
of your neighbor (for remember, gentle reader, 
you are Japanese for the while) not one has a 
crowded homeland like yours, needing more 
territory for the annual population increase of 



THE WHITE PERIL 171 

700,000. Not a single one of them! — and yet 
they have finally advanced until the White Peril 
which has overrun the world has arrived at your 
very door. To quote from President Cleveland, 
it "is a condition and not a theory that con- 
fronts" you, and that condition insistently pre- 
sents the question of the famous Tammany chief- 
tain, "What are you going to do about it?" Are 
you going to leave Russia in Manchuria with her 
great stronghold of Port Arthur as convenient 
to your coasts as is British Wei-hai-wei across 
the gulf, or nearby German Tsingtao? And 
while you are turning this condition over in your 
Japanese mind, don't forget that Kussia re- 
placed you in the Liao Tung peninsula after you 
had handsomely won it in the Chinese War, be- 
cause, forsooth! the Russian, French and Ger- 
man Governments, by a polite joint note ex- 
pressed their fear that its continued occupation 
by you would menace international peace ! It was 
all right for a white man to hold that strategic 
Chinese port — any white man ; but not you ! But 
let us get back to the Tammany man's practical 
inquiry, "What are you going to do about it?" 
Why, exactly what you did do about it — attack 
the Russian, throw him out of Manchuria, take 
and hold the menace of Port Arthur, and then 
eliminate his influence from Korea, where he 



172 THE WHITE PERIL 

not only stood for the lowest form of inefficient 
and unsanitary burlesque on government, but 
actually encouraged the persistence of the igno- 
rance and filth that made the Hermit Kingdom 
in every sense a stench, — a land of but two 
classes, the robbers and the robbed. The Ameri- 
can people openly sympathized with the Japa- 
nese cause in their Russian War, and President 
Koosevelt led in approving and formally recog- 
nizing the annexation of Korea by Japan. 

One of the chief causes of our Spanish War 
was our inability longer to tolerate the constant 
yellow fever danger from Cuban ports which the 
Spaniards neither could nor cared to control. 
And yet Cuba in her worst days was as an anti- 
septic hospital ward in comparison with what 
Korea always meant to Japan — just across Tsu- 
shima Straits. Now, are you, kind sir or madam, 
at last and for the first time, beginning to see 
the Far Eastern problem through Japanese 
eyes, and therefore in a new light? Shantung 
and Korea, the two sore points of Japanese 
aggression, as some Occidentals call them; — yes, 
but how do the Japanese feel about them? That 
is something never considered by the "rocking 
chair fleet" of internationahsts at home who 
have never seen the Far East but have talked so 
incessantly of the Yellow Peril bogey, that they 



f THE WHITE PERIL 173 

cannot realize the swallowing powers of that 
real dragon, the White Peril, and how he is re- 
garded by the other fellow. 

We have seen that to the Japanese Korea, al- 
ways a dangerous pest-breeding neighbor, would, 
if left to the Russian, afford a handy spring- 
board for a leap upon nearby Japan. The Rus- 
sian was defeated, and Korea has been cleaned 
up. And what does Shantung mean to the 
Japanese? It means an eleventh-hour decision 
to prevent the passage into white hands of that 
last remnant of Asia which fronted on the Japan 
dominated waters, the waters so vital to the 
island race living in their midst. The Japanese 
cannot, for the life of him, understand America's 
excitement over Shantung province when there 
was none over Germany's taking it, and when 
the French holding of the far greater provinces 
in Tonkin, etc., excite Americans no more than 
do England's or Russia's takings from China I 
If the reader still has on his Japanese spectacles, 
can he see why Japan should give up Shantung 
while the French, English, or Russians retain 
their lots of broken China? If I were Japanese 
I would loosen my hold on Shantung at the same 
time that the French, English and Russians re- 
linquish their acquisitions of Chinese territory, 
and not a minute sooner. But — I would not 



174 THE WHITE PERIL 

have agreed to restore Shantung to China as 
Japan did in her 1914 ultimatum to Germany, 
nor would I have promised to support the sov- 
ereignty of the Korean royal house only a few 
short years before August 29, 1910, when Korea 
was incorporated into the Japanese Empire. 
But that remark brings us round a sharp corner 
into a subject far wider than the Far East — ^it 
brings us face to face with the long established 
usages of European diplomacy. 

In the Japanese formal assurances just cited, 
whereby she seemingly gave definite outlines to 
her future policies regarding those two moot 
points of Far Eastern discussion — Shantung 
and Korea, Japan was but following a well un- 
derstood and commonly accepted system of 
verbiage employed by European diplomacy. 
Some ill-judged friends of Japan claim that she 
was only giving expression to an Oriental's de- 
sire to say something pleasant whilst awaiting 
future events to shape themselves conveniently 
for the speaker. There is no use, and certainly 
no common sense, in advancing that sort of ex- 
planation which does not explain. Frankness 
is best and therefore wisest, and the frank fact 
is that Japan's early statements and later acts 
(until she returns Shantung to China) are 
nothing more or less than parallels of England's 



THE WHITE PERIL 175 

concerning Egypt. England went into Egypt 
hand in hand with France, and under the sooth- 
ing fiction of allegiance and support to the 
Khedive representing there the Turkish Sultan. 
Presently the French found themselves firmly, 
but very, very gently disengaged from the Egyp- 
tian situation, and England remaining alone in 
the saddle, with of course the allegiance-to- 
Khedive fiction still out in the show window. 
The English did wonders in Egypt. They 
cleaned up an Augean stable, they harnessed the 
once dangerous Nile so that its floods became 
uninterruptedly profitable, they gave good gov- 
ernment to a downtrodden people, — indeed, no- 
where has the justly praised colonial rule of the 
EngHsh borne sounder fruit. But — and note 
this, you critics of Japanese verbiage anent 
Shantung and Korea, — it was all done under 
the diplomatic fiction of promising allegiance to 
a ruler not allowed to rule, — of seeming subor- 
dination of the real and acting power just like 
the Japanese phraseology regarding the Korean 
royal house. Nobody ever calls England's treat- 
ment of Egypt an example of Oriental duplicity 
— ^they approvingly style it a splendid undertak- 
ing of the White Man's Burden I 

If Japan seeks a European model for her dip- 
lomatic action she need not go so far back as the 



176 THE WHITE PERIL 

beginning of English rule in Egypt. She has 
only to make use of English phraseology in her 
1919 dealings with Persia. Russia went to 
pieces, and so did the old understanding dividing 
Persia into two spheres of influence, the northern, 
Russian, and the southern, English. Did Eng- 
land then take over all of Persia outright? Cer- 
tainly not I — ^no more (in words) than Japan did 
Korea, — and no less! All she did was to bind 
Persia to purchase all military and other govern- 
ment equipment from England, and to take from 
her also all "advisers" of any and every depart- 
ment, and to borrow from her all moneys needed, 
whether for railroads or other improvements ad- 
vised by the English "advisers," and also to let 
them "advise" in the revision of her tariff. That 
is all, and further, the English Government, 
with small sense of humor, goes on to agree in 
the same documents "to respect absolutely the 
independence and integrity of Persia"! This, of 
course, puts Persia to-day under the same sort 
of British domination that was exercised over 
Egypt until the action of the Sultan in the war 
necessitated dropping the outworn fiction of 
allegiance to his sovereignty. This is not written 
to criticize England, but to readjust the view- 
point of those who criticize Japan for using the 
same diplomatic formulas and methods before 



THE WHITE PERIL 177 

taking over Korea as England used in Egypt 
and in Persia. The Korean episode was not 
"typical of Oriental diplomacy" — it was only 
European diplomacy applied by Orientals in the 
Orient, that is all. 

As for Shantung, when you view it from the 
Japanese point of view, and realize she is not 
taking all that her 1917 treaties with England, 
France and Italy permitted, you will see that 
the Japanese have a right to flatter themselves 
that they are showing far more moderation than 
has ever been shown in the Far East by her three 
European predecessors and instructors in China 
partitioning. The very fact of the negotiation 
of those treaties indicates that those three Euro- 
pean Powers would have made some disposition 
among themselves of Germany's loot in Shan- 
tung if they had not approved the status quo of 
Japanese occupation. And what proof, say you, 
is there for such an imphcation that they would 
not have given Shantung back to China? This, 
— did England fail to grasp Wei-hai-wei when, 
in 1895, the European Powers forced Japan to 
relinquish her war -won Chinese prizes? — cer- 
tainly not; when Japan was forced out England 
took it herself and holds it to-day. Did China 
get back Manchuria that same year when Japan 
was forced out? — no, Russia moved in. That 



178 THE WHITE PERH. 

which is all right for a white power is all wrong 
for Japan, — ^what unfair bosh! If Japan had 
not taken over Germany's rights in Shantung 
(against whose taking by Germany there was 
no American or other protest), then one of the 
usual European annexers would surely have 
stepped in, just as England did into Wei-haiT 
wei, or Russia into Manchuria after the Japanese 
defeat of China, and annexed it. At the date 
of this writing I firmly believe that China will 
receive back far more of Shantung from the 
Japanese than she would have gotten had the 
English or French occupied the German hold 
ings there. 

All men of common sense, of whatever nation- 
ahty, regard England's control of Egypt as hav- 
ing been a blessing for the land and its people. 
England will surely perform for Mesopotamia 
and for Persia the same miracle of irrigation 
transforming a desert into paradise that Egypt 
shows, and we look forward with keen interest 
to that certain result. Well and good, but now 
let us use these same eyes of benevolent approval 
for another people blessed and another land im- 
proved, but not by directing them upon an 
Egypt of to-day or a Mesopotamia or Persia of 
to-morrov/, but upon Korea. Wliat will the 
visitor there see ? 



THE WHITE PERIL 179 

There were in December, 1918, 336,872 Jap- 
anese in Korea, of which 66,943 were in Seoul. 
What are they doing for the country and its 
18,000,000 people? Its range on range of bare 
hills remind one travelling from the seaport of 
Fusan to inland Seoul of New Mexico and 
Arizona, or Spain, or Algeria. This is because 
the improvident Koreans denuded the country 
of its splendid forests. The Japanese (success- 
ful foresters, as their own pine-clad hills show) 
have set out no less than 473,195,796 trees in 
Korea, and are still pressing on with its reforesta- 
tion. They are employing as many Koreans as 
possible, over three times as many as were so 
employed in 1910. In 1911, April 3 was selected 
as Arbor Day and six years later over 750,000 
participated in its beneficent exercises. The out- 
put of the Korean coal mines has been nearly 
trebled since 1910. Her foreign trade went up 
from 59 million yen in 1910 to 131 million in 1917, 
Her railway mileage has doubled under Japa- 
nese control. Savings are being encouraged, as 
appears from the last available report (January, 
1917) which shows 827,215 Korean depositors, 
and an increase of 177,687 individuals during the 
preceding year. The telegraph lines have been 
doubled in length by the Japanese and the 1910 
telephone lines of 302 miles have grown to over 



180 THE WHITE PERIL 

3,000 miles. Both highways and street exten- 
sions show even handsomer increases, and Seoul 
with its many broad avenues is, thanks to the 
Japanese, one of the best paved cities in the 
Orient. Extensive harbor improvements have 
transformed the old-fashioned Korean ports into 
models of modern embarkation points. Espe- 
cially have the Japanese encouraged agriculture 
in their new province and thereby secured con- 
stantly increasing benefits for the inhabitants, 
of whom 80 per cent are normally agriculturists, 
producing 70 per cent of their land's exports. 
Model farms, experimental stations and train- 
ing stations have been set up in many centres, 
and over a million yen is thus annually expended 
to uplift the Korean farmers. Left to himself 
he would cultivate nothing but rice, and when it 
was harvested wait until next season for the 
same crop, but the Japanese are teaching him 
new side lines — fruit trees, cotton, sugar beet, 
hemp, tobacco, silk worms, sheep breeding, etc. 
An increase of several hundred per cent in wheat, 
bean and barley acreage has thus been achieved. 
The cotton acreage increased from 1,123 cho in 
1910 to 48,000 in 1917, and the number of fruit 
trees more than trebled. Numerous factories, 
something hitherto unknown in the land, have 
been introduced, affording occupation for thou- 



THE WHITE PERIL 181 

sands of Koreans. Startling improvements in 
health conditions have been effected by means 
of hygienic inspection and government hos- 
pitals and by new waterworks everywhere. The 
schools, especially industrial schools, are vigor- 
ously and successfully combating the old Ko- 
rean ignorance and shiftlessness. This hurried 
glimpse of Japan's efforts to better Korean con- 
ditions doesn't read like the selfish efforts of an 
oppressor, does it? The foregoing is a fair pic- 
ture of Japanese rule in Korea, and it richly 
deserves to be hung alongside of the one depict- 
ing England's service to Egypt, nor need it fear 
comparison. 

As for Japan's governmental administration 
in Korea since 1910, the fairest comment is that 
the military government there was not success- 
ful. Few military chiefs are of the type afford- 
ing successful colonial governors, while their 
subordinate officers, especially those of the lower 
ranks, are almost always tactless. The Japanese 
themselves, from their experiences in Formosa 
as well as in Korea, found out this fact, and in 
the summer of 1919 the mistake was corrected 
by Imperial rescript, and civil governors re- 
placed the military ones in both those provinces. 
No matter which nation undertakes it, military 
government for a dependency proves unsatis- 



182 THE WHITE PERIL 

factory. We found this out in the early days 
of our Philippine experiments, where there oc- 
curred several unpleasant episodes of drastic 
"water cures" and the like tyrannical exercises of 
power by under-officers. It would have proved 
equally true in Cuba, if in General Wood we 
had not happened to have an administrator of 
unusual abihty and tact. It must not be for- 
gotten that even the worst instances of unwis- 
dom cited against the Japanese military rule in 
Korea were as beneficent blessings in compari- 
son with the consistently continuous misrule by 
Koreans which it succeeded. 

American readers wiU be interested to learn 
that Baron Saito, lately appointed Governor 
General of Korea, although now for twenty years 
out of the active naval service, was in 1898 the 
commander of the Japanese cruiser "Akitsu- 
shima'* which put in to Manila Harbor just after 
Admiral Dewey's great victory. Admiral Von 
Diederich, bent on making trouble for the Ameri- 
cans, sent his Flag Lieutenant Von Hintze 
(years later Minister for Foreign Affairs) to 
persuade Captain Saito to join in resisting 
Admiral Dewey's regulation requiring an Amer- 
ican officer to visit every incoming vessel even 
if a warship, on the ground that it was "visit 
and search" and as such illegal and improper. 



THE WHITE PERIL 183 

Captain Saito's reply was that if he were in Ad- 
miral Dewey's place he would act just as he 
was acting, and that so far from joining with 
Von Diederich he accepted the visit from the 
American officer as a welcome act of courtesy! 
The selection of such a man by the Mikado in 
the summer of 1919 to be his Governor General 
superseding the military government, and the 
appointment as Consul General by our State 
Depai'tment of Mr. Hansford Miller, one of our 
best equipped men in Far Eastern matters, 
augurs weU for a better mutual understanding 
at that difficult post. 

After reading a number of the attacks upon 
Japan's behavior in Korea, alleged or actuated 
by American missionaries in that field, I hap- 
pened upon some incidents and facts which 
aroused my suspicions, so I went to Seoul and 
investigated upon the ground. One of these in- 
cidents was my happening to notice that, in a 
photograph sent from Korea and published in 
ai'^putable American magazine [Current Opin- 
ion), the uniforms worn by Japanese soldiers 
who were shooting a Korean victim were not the 
uniforms of to-day, but those worn in 1895 dur- 
ing the Chinese-Russian War. The photograph 
proved to be one of an execution in 1895 of a 
Chinese spy caught in Korean costume! Those 



184j the white PERIL 

who sent this photogi-aph to America for publica- 
tion intended to deceive the American publisher 
(which they did) and through him his Ameri- 
can readers; people who will thus deliberately 
deceive once, will not stop at one deception! 
The perusal of Dr. Robert Speer's report on the 
missionary situation in Korea afforded another 
reason for my desire to see for myself that which 
was being so severely attacked by the very mis- 
sionaries whom the fair-minded Secretaiy of the 
Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions de- 
scribed. I have been a member of the Foreign 
Missions Committee of a Presbyterian church in 
New York City and therefore certainly not 
prejudiced against the movement, but on the 
other hand, I beheve strongly that work in the 
foreign field should always be conducted with 
proper respect for the government there exist- 
ing. A member of an American missionary 
family who had lived twenty years in Seoul told 
me they there generally believed that the Japa- 
nese were trying to drive them out of the coun- 
try because American teaching of Christianity 
was subversive of the Imperial Government! 
Such men and women, earnest hard working 
Christians though they be, should remember that 
when attempt was made to draw from Our 
Saviour a criticism of Roman taxes, the reply 



THE WHITE PERIL 185 

began, "Render unto Csesar the things that are 
Caesar's." Missionary methods that are sub- 
versive of foreign governmental systems are 
unchristian and need changing — and so do the 
missionaries ! 

The Seoul Press of December 12, 1919, de- 
votes a leading article to the annual conference 
of Methodists in Korea held in Seoul. The 
paper states that the foreign missionaries had no 
part whatsoever in the recent political disturb- 
ances in the peninsula, and weight attaches to 
this editorial statement because the Seoul Press 
is more or less the mouthpiece both of the Gov- 
ernment-General of Korea as well as of the 
PoHce Bureau. The following is an editorial 
article of the Seoul Press, pubMshed under the 
heading of "Missionaries at the Cross Ways" : 

"We learn with great pleasure that at an 
annual conference of Methodists throughout 
Chosen recently held in Seoul, Bishop Herbert 
Welch gave to Korean pastors and evangehsts 
present a very timely warning and instruction. 
As we have it, the Bishop spoke to the following 
effect: 

" 'You are leaders and teachers of Christian 
converts, and your whole concern should be 
directed to spiritual work. I am confident that 
none of you have anything to do with politics 



186 THE WHITE PERIL 

under the cloak of religion. If, however, any of 
you are found to be speaking and acting at vari- 
ance with the spirit of Christianity, I shall not 
tolerate it. It is really disappointing to find 
that since spring last not a few workers in our 
church have acted contrary to our expectation. 
Heligionists have their own sphere of activity, as 
pohticians have theirs. Since we have devoted 
ourselves to religious work, it is only proper that 
we should confine our activity to it; in fact, it is 
our duty to do so. I am confident that all of 
you are working with the spirit of self-sacrifice 
and in conformity with the principle of our 
faith.' " 

"The above quotation is not verbatim, so we 
cannot vouchsafe for its accuracy. It is certain, 
however, that Bishop Welch emphatically dis- 
approved of any Korean Christian workers 
taking part in political movements. 

"In spite of all things said to the contrary, 
we persist in our conviction that no foreign mis- 
sionaries have ever abetted or encouraged their 
Korean followers to rise against the Govern- 
ment. Some of them might have shown passive 
sympathy towards Korean agitators in their 
aspirations and hopes. It is an undeniable fact 
that the Korean agitators include many men 
and women prominent in the Presbyterian and 



THE WHITE PERIL ISY 

Methodist Churches. This fact, however, does 
not necessarily establish the erroneous contention 
very often put forth by some Japanese jingoists 
that foreign missionaries are at their, back. We 
continue to believe that those Korean Christians 
who have taken part in the agitations have done 
so on their own account without either the 
knowledge or approval of their foreign teachers 
and leaders. 

"Nevertheless, we cannot be blind to the fact 
that the passive sympathy shown Korean agita- 
tors, in word and writing, by some foreign mis- 
sionaries aggravated the situation, the agitators 
interpreting this to the credulous masses as a 
token of the foreign aid which they said would 
be forthcoming. It is a thousand pities that 
these missionaries did not take a more manly and 
resolute attitude and declare to their Korean 
followers their disapproval of any of them tak- 
ing part in the useless and harmful agitation. 
Had they done so, the trouble would not have 
assumed the dimension it did. It is of no 'use, 
however, to cry over spilt milk. Let the past 
bury its past. Now that the Government- Gen- 
eral of Chosen has been reorganized under a most 
liberal-minded and able statesman and many 
good reforms are on the eve of being effected 
for the benefit of the Korean people, let us hope 



188 THE WHITE PERIL 

that such foreign missionaries as we have re- 
ferred to will completely change their attitude 
and guide their Korean followers in the right 
way as Bishop Welch has shown. They now 
stand at the cross ways, either to cooperate with 
the Government and make it their friend or to 
persist in opposing it and make it antagonistic 
to themselves as well as to their work. We have 
sufficient faith in their wisdom that they will 
make no mistake in their choice." 

The only comment or suggestion made to me 
at any time by the Japanese authorities regard- 
ing American missionaries in Korea struck me 
as sound common sense — they said, "Why don't 
you send to Korea (a Japanese province) mis- 
sionaries who have worked at least a year in Ja- 
pan, say in the language schools, and who thus, 
understanding the Japanese, do not begin work 
in Korea with the prejudice of ignorance against 
everything Japanese." Could anything be fairer 
than that? There are too many of our mission- 
aries who have lived so long in Korea as to think 
they own the country, and they can countenance 
no changes therein, even improvements. In that 
connection it is discouraging to note that in that 
flourishing missionary field, with hundreds of 
missionaries and over 300,000 Korean converts, 
Christianity seems to have left its converts about 



THE WHITE PERIL 189 

as ignorant and filthy as before their conversion, 
and nothing like so advanced in civilization and 
decency of life as the nearby Buddhists and Shin- 
toists of Japan. Why? Perhaps some light on 
the answer can be gotten from Dr. S peer's offi- 
cial report, a perusal of which hardly inclines 
one to select as broad-minded guides for shaping 
American pubhc opinion toward Japan some of 
the men he there describes. They are doing faith- 
ful work according to their lights, but thej^ are 
hardly qualified for advisers upon international 
affairs, in which calm judgment must go hand 
in hand with a constant desire for good will 
among men. 

Reverting to the danger of foreigners un- 
thinkingly abusing a nation's hospitality by acts 
or teachings subversive of its authority, I must 
confess to believing before visiting the Far East 
that democracy was the best form of government 
for all peoples. A study on the spot of the con- 
trast between the excellently functioning Im- 
perial Government of Japan on the one hand; 
and, on the other, the disheartening venality of 
many officials of the Chinese Republic plus the 
situation in Siberia made too free for democracy, 
has readjusted my point of view. Democracy 
for peoples like the Anglo-Saxons — decidedly 
yes! — but for the Far East, no, Kipling re- 



190 THE WHITE PERIL 

marks that Russia is an eastern and not a western 
nation, and of Siberia especially is this true. 
Mr. Alfred R. Castle, a distinguished Harvard 
graduate, of Honolulu, who served in Siberia 
with the American Red Cross, states that of the 
380 Bolshevist Commissars constituting their 
government in all parts of European Russia and 
Siberia, 286 were Russian Jews who had lived 
in America, and nearly all in New York City's 
lower East Side. With grim humor, thus did 
"chickens come home to roost" for the Russian 
people at large, and the awful tragedies of their 
Jewish pogroms were amply revenged. Trotzky 
was evidently not the only viper we warmed a.t 
our national bosom. During the dark days of 
the Jewish pogroms in Russia, American Jews 
rightly ralHed to their support and brought all 
possible influence to bear upon our government 
to urge a square deal for their co-religionists in 
Russia. But this new situation is a different one, 
because many of these so-called Jews now in- 
fluential in Russia are apostates. There is a 
fine significance in the fact that such sterling 
Jewish leaders as Rabbi Silverman are recogniz- 
ing that American Jews should not support law- 
less anarchists just because they happened to be 
born in the Jewish faith. Russia's experiments 
in democracy are even less encouraging than 



THE WHITE PERIL 191 

China's. No, neither missionaries nor American 
commercial pioneers, nor any other decent for- 
ward-looking men are faced the right way when 
they speak or act, even unintentionally, so as to 
make trouble for such a preserver of order as 
the responsible Japanese governmental system 
daily shows itself to be, least of all while living 
in lands under the Japanese flag. That system 
suits its own people, and if it doesn't suit any 
of our people, it would be well if they came home, 
for better relations between our country and 
Japan are of the first importance. 

So much for Shantung and Korea, an elev- 
enth-hour stand by one nation alone against 
the rapidly advancing world-consuming "White 
Peril. If a complete readjustment of the Ca,li- 
fornian friction can be effected, and if American 
public opinion will consent to enlightenment 
upon the Shantung and Korean questions, not 
only will a long step be taken toward restoring 
feelings similar to those of 1905 between our two 
peoples, but also two objects will be achieved, 
important alike to the Japanese and to Ameri- 
can labor and American capital. Japan has 
been placed alongside Asian markets by the "Act 
of God," but she needs American capital to de- 
velop them. Our capital seeking outlets to Asian 
markets (sure to give added employment to 



192 THE WHITE PERIL 

American labor) needs the advantages of that 
Oriental cooperation which China's neighbor, 
Japan, controls for geographical and racial rea- 
sons. The best international "deal" is that which 
benefits both parties thereto, and here is such a 
combination. Here is a Far Eastern policy that 
squares with our history, our needs and our 
ideals. 



CHAPTEK VIII 

THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

One of the most ingenious of Kaiser Wil- 
helm's lines of propaganda found expression in 
his constantly recurring warnings against the 
Yellow Peril, which he painted with artistic skill. 
Its purpose was to arouse such suspicions be- 
tween Japan and America as would leave him 
free uninterruptedly to develop his policy of 
island grabbing in the Pacific. Under a smoke 
screen of Yellow Peril talk the cruelty of his 
soldiers to the Chinese after the relief of Peking 
from the Boxers passed almost unnoticed. His 
plan succeeded, especially in America, but not so 
much along the eastern seaboard as throughout 
the rest of our land. 

Before the outbreak of the German Peril, our 
fellow-citizens living west of the Rockies fre- 
quently urged that the rest of us were carelessly 
regardless of this Yellow Peril, that we con- 
sidered our Atlantic seaboard as the country's 

193 



194 THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

front door, and cared little for what might be 
going on at the back door facing another great 
ocean. Perhaps they were right, and that too, 
regardless of whether or not there exists a real 
Yellow Peril. One of the oldest of London's 
famous merchant guilds is that of the Scriven- 
ers. At their annual banquet there is handed 
around the table, from man to man, a splendid 
loving cup, ancient, — curiously and richly em- 
bossed. As each man rises to drink therefrom, 
there stands back to back with him he who last 
drank, holding up in an attitude of defense the 
massive silver cover of the great tankard. Why 
this quaint custom? it dates from the days when 
he who so far relaxed his vigilance as to drink 
from a cup, even among friends, risked a dag- 
ger stab, and therefore needed some one to pro- 
tect his back. We must admit that most Ameri- 
cans had become accustomed to look out upon 
the rest of the world with an eastward glance, 
directed toward the Atlantic seaboard or the gulf 
ports. But what about the Pacific Ocean at their 
back? Aren't our California cousins right, and 
should we not draw a lesson from the ancient 
worthies of the Scriveners' Guild and protect 
that important half of our national anatomy as 
well as the other? With that determination, let 
us turn about and take a serious look at the 



THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 195 

present international situation to the west of us, 
if only to see whether or not a Yellow Peril 
really threatens us. 

Even a careless observer can see that it is 
materially altered by the fact that, owing to the 
war, the Germans have dropped out and the 
Russians have blown up. And those very Ger- 
mans and Russians were, in that great neighbor- 
hood, serious elements of unrest and aggression. 
The insatiable territorial greed of their two 
imperial governments knew no rest; both were 
willing to go to the limit, and both were approach- 
ing it rapidly. The Czar had met a check at the 
hands of the Japanese, but the Kaiser was still 
uncurbed. On which side those two powers 
would have finally taken their stand if a real 
Yellow Peril arose, no one could say — least of 
all any who read what the war disclosed of For- 
eign Office documents penned in Berlin or Pet- 
rograd. As against those two dangerous factors 
now disappeared from the Pacific are there not 
other ones arrived or looming up which serve as 
antidotes against any Yellow Peril, no matter 
how serious? We shall see. 

But let us examine for a few minutes this 
Yellow Peril of which one has heard so much. 
What is the nature of this illusion and what does 
it become in the dreams of certain demagogues 



196 THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

among us? Nothing more or less than that the 
entire Japanese nation is training itself (as did 
Germany) for military aggression, that it will 
be directed against us, either before or after the 
said completely Teutonized Japanese nation has 
taken over and trained to arms their 400,000,000 
Chinese neighbors, an irresistible yellow army, 
lusting to fall upon the white Americans. That, 
condensed into a few words, is the Yellow Peril 
as seen first by many American jingoes, second, 
by a large proportion of the citizens of our 
Pacific coast states, and — last, but not at all least, 
by a few militaristic Japanese. Most of these 
widely differing folk, wherever they reside, must 
be convinced they are in error before the YeUow 
Peril bogey is laid. How can such a peace-be- 
getting crusade be planned? 

Let us first consider the few militaristic Japa- 
nese jingoes. The Japanese people are unusually 
shrewd, and as a race gifted with a high average 
of common sense. It must be admitted that the 
present generation has tasted great military 
glory, first in their defeat of the Chinese in 1895, 
and later, in 1905, in their destruction of the gen- 
eral belief in Russian invincibility. This taste of 
military glory was exceeding good, and undoubt- 
edly strengthened the hand of the mihtary party. 
But excellent as was the flavor of those achieve- 



THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 197 

ments, the hard-headed Japanese cannot forget 
that they were followed by years of grievous 
taxation, from which there was little promise of 
relief, until, unexpectedly, huge orders for sup- 
pHes needed for the European conflict happily 
turned the trade balance in favor of Japan. 

I have never seen such widely distributed 
prosperity as that which Japan is to-day enjoy- 
ing, and its innumerable beneficiaries are for 
peace, and resolutely set against anything which 
may interrupt that prosperity. The urgent de- 
mand for labor at mounting wages is emptying 
th? prisons, and mercantile life has gained so 
many new charms that this year, instead of a 
waiting list at the military academy, there are 
many vacancies in the entering class, numerous 
applicants preferring a business to a military 
career. 

America and Japan lead the world in that de- 
velopment of journalism known as the "yellow 
press", so we, of all people, should be sympa- 
thetic, and not startled, to learn that certain 
Japanese yellow journals used to print lurid 
articles to the effect that Russia or Germany, or 
both, could be relied upon to finance Japanese 
aggression against us. Especially were such 
articles necessary to military jingoism during the 
long period of heavy taxation between the end 



198 THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

of the Kusso-Japanese War and the receipt of 
enriching war orders that followed 1914. Any 
Japanese would object to a new war at the pres- 
ent day cost of war, if it meant heavier internal 
taxation. Each modern war costs more per diem 
than its predecessor for new destructive appli- 
ances, nor can any army lacking them stand 
against one equipped therewith. But it was all 
so simple, according to these journalistic shadow- 
dancers — increased taxes would not be necessary 
because funds would be provided from the vast 
war chest and gold reserve of Germany irked 
by the Monroe Doctrine in South America, — or 
from the even longer purse of Russia, which 
Rudyard Kipling reminded the world was the 
most westerly of eastern nations, and not the 
most easterly of western ones. But the terms 
of the Versailles treaty of peace and the ruinous 
results of Russian Bolshevism have interrupted 
this financial pipedream, and broken the pipe 
once and for all. Taxes must go up»to finance 
another war — there is no other way ! 

Furthermore, greatly as Japanese military 
politicians and their yellow press may, in the 
past, have sneered at American unpreparedness, 
classing us with the Chinese, even they cannot 
to-day mislead the average Japanese upon this 
subject, in view of our millions of trained sol- 



THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 199 

diers, and the demonstration of our wholehearted 
seriousness in the waging of a war. 

In the war-changed Pacific Ocean situation, 
of even greater significance than the elimination 
of Russia and Germany, is the greatly enhanced 
importance of Australia within the British Em- 
pire, discussed in a later chapter, and the revo- 
lutionized strength of the American fighting 
force. Before the war (June 30, 1914), we had 
under arms 92,482 soldiers, 55,384 sailors and 
10,272 marines. When the armistice was signed 
(November 11, 1918), we possessed armed and 
eijuipped 3,670,888 soldiers, 510,691 sailors and 
32,385 marines. In addition to this great force 
of about four and a quarter million fighting men, 
we already had registered and subject to im- 
mediate call to the colors, six million more sol* 
diers, making an astounding total of over ten 
million! It has been computed that New York 
State alone provided 370,000 of these fighting 
men, and that if the armistice had not stopped 
the operation of the draft, that State alone would 
have sent by July, 1919, the impressive total of 
810,000 to the Federal camps and to France. As 
Adjutant General of that State, and therefore 
the officer in charge there of the Federal draft, 
I cannot bear too earnest tribute to the skill, 
energy and tact with which Major General 



200 THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

Crowder, the Provost Marshal General, one of 
the great "finds" of the war, conducted that 
amazing business. It was an inspiration as well 
as an honor to serve under his orders. 

Admiral Mahan points out that a greatly 
superior fleet does not need to fight in order to 
gain its purpose; it achieves it without fighting. 
The surrender without a struggle of the German 
fleet proves he was right. For this reason, our 
tremendous increase in fighting power, and the 
demonstration of how whole-heartedly we apply 
our wealth to war purposes, have already won us 
a great victory for peace and rendered ridiculous 
any Yellow Peril bogey. Foreign jingoes who, 
before we awoke in 1917, might have urged 
aggression against the United States, will from 
now on have difficulty in secin-ing a hearing at 
their own Foreign Office. Especially will this 
be true if we maintain the efficiency of our Fleet, 
and introduce a system of short military training 
for our young men along lines similar to that 
practised by the peace-loving Swiss. 

Of all illusory international prognostications, 
the flimsiest is the possibility of Japan's con- 
structing a vast yeUow army of Chinese to attack 
us. The most outstanding reasons for its flimsi- 
ness are, first, the really genuine friendship for 
us felt by the Chinese (which we have deserved. 



THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 201 

thank God! and may we continue to do sol) 
coupled with their constantly growing hatred of 
the Japanese, caused by their defeat in 1895, by 
the definite loss of Manchui'ia, by the 21 demands 
of 1915 and the method of their presentation, by 
the recent Shantung episode, etc., etc. The 
second reason is, as we have already seen, that 
the Chinese are not a mihtary people, therein 
differing widely from the Japanese. To the 
latter, centuries of training and the importance 
enjoyed all through their history by the Samurai 
or fighting man, have put a high premium upon 
warlike valor, whilst in China the soldier ranked 
lowest in the social scale, at the top of which pub- 
lic opinion placed the peaceful student, untrained 
in arms and disdainful thereof. Just so surely 
as the traditions of old Japan have made her 
to-day a soldiery nation, equally certain is it that 
no nation, least of all hated Japan, will ever be 
able to fashion a great anti- American fighting 
force out of the inbred pacifism of the Chinese. 
Senator Reed of Missouri stated in the United 
States Senate that of the total population of the 
countries composing the proposed League of 
Nations, 811,425,500 would be yellow, brown, 
red and black races, with only 289,488,800 of the 
white race. One-half of that preponderating 
total of non-white races are the peace-loving 



202 THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

Chinese, whose numbers are neutralized by the 
facts of their centuries-long inbred pacifism, 
their traditional friendship for the United States, 
and their antipathy toward the Japanese. The 
rest of these non-white races, except those of 
heterogeneous India, are too widely scattered to 
become unitedly effective. 

So much for laying the Yellow Peril ghost 
among Japanese military extremists, and now 
let us have a shot at it among our own people. 

During a recent stay of nearly four months in 
California, spent at different points throughout 
that peculiarly American State, the writer car- 
ried on a campaign of inquiry among all sorts of 
persons as to how they felt about the Japanese 
Peril, or (to combine those islanders with the 
Chinese) the Yellow Peril. Easterners and res- 
idents of our middle west would be surprised 
to find, not only how widely is this feehng spread 
out there, but also the intelligence of the people 
entertaining it. In Riverside it was vehemently 
voiced by a lady superintending a reading room, 
by a library assistant, and by the leading auto- 
mobile agent ; in Pasadena by a student working 
his way through college as a hotel waiter and by 
the owner of a large store; by a prominent 
clergyman at Berkeley; and by an enterprising 
steamship agent in Los Angeles, etc. No one 



THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 203 

seemed to feel it more strongly than a bright 
young woman in a Santa Barbara book store, in- 
telligently posted upon the improved reading 
of that climatic paradise. In San Francisco the 
leading banker felt as strongly and talked as 
feelingly thereon as a shabby lounger on a park 
bench. An old-fashioned boss of that politics- 
loving metropolis remarked, "it's easy to be right 
in politics here — you've only got to be anti-Japa- 
nese and pro-Irish." But in every case, when 
pressed for the reason at the back of the anti- 
Japanese feeling, they all admitted to a dread of 
the Yellow Peril. So long as England and Ger- 
many were engaged in a struggle for naval su- 
premacy, so long as France and Germany were 
each seeking an army strength superior to its 
rival, just so long was there sure to be a strong, 
at times a bitter, feeling between the contesting 
nations. It is an unfortunate fact that so long 
as there continues a belief among our Western- 
ers of a Yellow Peril threatening us, just so long 
wiU there be postponed those cordial relations 
between us and Japan so greatly to be desired. 

Fortunately these fellow-citizens whose homes 
look out upon the Pacific know more than do the 
rest of us about the check upon the Yellow Peril 
afforded by the new Australia and Canada to 
which they are sympathetically alHed by a com- 



204! THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

mon unwillingness to admit Asiatic immigra- 
tion. The realization of this fact is slowly but 
surely laying the Yellow Peril bogey in the very 
part of our land best qualified to consider it and 
also the most interested. And the Japanese 
Government is doing even more than its share 
to eliminate cause for misunderstanding, as we 
will presently show. 

Those who seek to arouse white audiences by 
lurid pictures of the YeUow Peril love especially 
to dwell upon two horrid scenes — the Japanese 
arming and leading 400,000,000 Chinese in a 
conquest of the white world, and scene two — 
such a rapid increase of Japanese in California 
as will soon submerge the white population. As 
for scene one, it is a joke! Fighting has been 
bred out of the Chinese blood during a series of 
centuries. Occasional outbreaks of mob violence, 
yes — but intelligent continuous fighting, no! 
The Japanese are a race of fighters, but the 
Chinese are not, and never will be. Further- 
more, the Chinese distrust and dislike the Japa- 
nese even more than they trust and like Ameri- 
cans. The idea of a huge army of Chinese is 
impossible, except on faked payrolls (long a 
profitable and popular method of their military 
system) and that such an army, if raised, could 
be led by the Japanese against America is a 



THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 205 

wild dream! And now for scene two. Appalling 
statistics were being advanced to show that the 
few thousand Japanese now in California, plus 
the wives that are coming over to them from 
home, will increase at such a rate as to Orientalize 
in short order the population of our Pacific Coast 
States. Upon this subject I spoke as follows 
to a large banquet of Japanese in Tokyo, Nov- 
ember 19, 1919: 

"In 1905 the sympathy of all America was 
with Japan, and our pockets were open to your 
loans. In this connection may I remark that 
ours is the first nation in history to be at the 
same time the greatest reservoir both of capital 
and of raw materials. It is a great pity that to- 
day the American sentiments of 1905 are altered, 
but he who pretends otherwise is no true cham- 
pion of a better and lasting friendship between 
us. I have recently come from a three months' 
study of these misunderstandings in California, 
and shall venture a suggestion to ameliorate the 
situation. The 'Gentlemen's Agreement' was a 
wise diplomatic device, which recognized that 
Japanese immigration to the United States sets 
up a competition between our labor and the 
Japanese laborer who accepts less money and 
longer hours than our men. It also recognized 
that this economic undercutting of the American 



206 THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

laborer was arousing friction, and you wisely 
undertook to check it. In your millions of fru- 
gal, industrious laborers lies your greatest power 
to conquer the markets of the world. But every 
rose has a thorn ! — and your ability to hve cheaper 
and work longer than Occidentals is the thorn 
felt by American labor when your rose is trans- 
planted to California. Beheve me, gentlemen, 
the problem surrounding Japanese immigration 
into America is an economic and not a racial one. 
Here is a proof. When I was in California some 
years ago so bitter was the feeling there against 
cheaper living Chinese laborers, that it was not 
safe for Chinamen to walk alone at night in cer- 
tain quarters of San Francisco. They then caUed 
it racial antipathy and not economic friction, but, 
since Chinese immigration has been suspended, 
and therefore the economic friction removed. 
Chinamen have become popular in California. 
You meet this Chinese immigration question just 
as we did, for you do not allow cheaper living 
Chinese or Korean labor to enter Japan to com- 
pete with your people. (ISTote: It is not many 
months since a Japanese mine-owner contracted 
to bring about 25,000 Chinese coolies to work at 
his mines in the Yamaguchi-ken, near Shimono- 
seki, in the west of Japan. He actually brought 
in 2,000 of these Chinese, but his appHcation for 



THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 207. 

the necessary permission covering the whole 
transaction was denied by the local authorities. 
He appealed that decision to Tokyo, but it was 
upheld, and he had to ship his 2,000 Chinese 
back home, and the venture cost him over 65,000 
yen. This story was told me by an editor of a 
leading Tokyo newspaper). There is no prov- 
ince of Japan where there are 110,000 Chinese 
or Korean laborers to 25,000 Japanese, as there 
are 110,000 Japanese to 25,000 Americans in 
Hawaii, and you are quite right thus to protect 
your labor from undercutting. There is no 
province of Japan where foreign labor is increas- 
ing by birth or otherwise in far greater propor- 
tion than the Japanese, and yet that is true of 
Japanese foreign labor in California. Your 
protection of Japanese labor against Chinese or 
Korean competition leads me to my promised 
suggestion. My investigations convince me that 
beyond doubt the Japanese Government has 
loyally lived up to both the spirit and the letter 
of the 'Gentlemen's Agreement,' but that agree- 
men ought to be supplemented by a 'Ladies' 
Agreement,' because the loyal adherence of your 
Government to the 'Gentlemen's Agreement' is 
being offset by the numerous 'picture brides' 
going from Japan to Japanese laborers in 
America. Their coming imperils our relations 



208 THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

more than you realize and for reasons difficult 
for you to understand. 

"All you see in this 'picture bride' system is 
a proper desire of your men abroad to get wives 
from home. You are accustomed to marriages 
being arranged by parents or friends, and there- 
fore cannot grasp how the 'picture bride' system 
surprises and jars upon our people. It isn't a 
question of right or wrong, but an affront to 
a long prevailing custom of our country, where 
we are as greatly attached to free matrimonial 
choice by both contracting parties themselves, as 
you are to your reverence for ancestors. Neither 
of us really understands how strongly the other 
feels in these regards. Furthermore, perhaps 
you do not realize that since these 'picture brides' 
are imported by Japanese laborers, they assist 
their husbands, thus becoming Japanese laborers 
themselves, and thus offsetting the loyalty of 
your Government to the 'Gentlemen's Agree- 
ment.' And besides, they bear many more chil- 
dren than do the wives of their American neigh- 
bors, thus constantly reminding them of the 
increasing proportion of Japanese to Americans 
in Hawaii, which brings us right back to the 
economic competition again. A 'Ladies' Agree- 
ment' limiting the number of laborers' wives 



THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 209 

going to America would restore the situation to 
the wise basis reached by the 'Gentlemen's Agree- 
ment.' The lack of a 'Ladies' Agreement' per- 
mits economic friction to increase, with a certain 
result that none of us cares to contemplate." 

Although these remarks were freely published 
in the Japanese press, no hostile comment ap- 
peared. On December 18th, one month later, the 
Japanese Ambassador at Washington officially 
notified our State Department that the issuance 
of passports to "picture brides" would be dis- 
continued. Thus the bottom falls out of the chief 
Yellow Peril argument in California, for if the 
female of the species is thus reduced in number, 
the alleged dangerous increase in Japanese birth- 
rate loses its danger, and the "Gentlemen's 
Agreement" plus its new ally, the "Ladies' 
Agreement," together provide all the restraint 
upon Japanese immigration that a reasonable 
American laborer can ask. The Japanese au- 
thorities, by this move, as friendly as it is saga- 
cious, have completely readjusted the difficult 
situation in California. 

So much for California, and now a few words 
about the situation in Hawaii, where 110,000 
Japanese overbalance the total citizenship of 
265,000, of which only 25,000 are white Ameri- 



210 THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

cans. Unfortunately, the Japanese at home do 
not understand how this excessive and increas- 
ing foreign element upon a portion of American 
territory is misunderstood abroad. A leading 
Japanese daily, the Tokyo YamatOj said not 
long ago: "We venture to advise America to 
adopt the principle of self-determination in 
Hawaii. While addi'essing this advice to Amer- 
ica, we urge that at the first conference of the 
League of Nations, Japan should bring forward 
a proposal for the execution of the principle of 
self-determination in Hawaii. This proposal 
would prove the acid test of America's so-called 
principle of justice and humanity." The recent 
plebiscites in territories claimed by Denmark and 
Germany show that such an appeal as the 
Yamato is up to date, and that the preponder- 
ance of Japanese in Hawaii threatens American 
sovereignty there, even though not by warlike 
means. I believe that a Japanese Government 
so capable of timely and tactful action as the 
present one can be counted on to relieve this 
situation. However, in view of the Yamato's 
article, it is urgent that it receive early considera- 
tion at their hands. 

There remains to be considered only the third 
class of Yellow Peril enthusiasts, and that but 



THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 211 

a small one — certain American demagogues. 
Demagogues are opportunists and float with the 
political current. So soon as they find that the 
average voter sees that the possibility of a dan- 
gerous military combination on the Pacific of 
the Germans or Russians, or both, with the 
Japanese no longer exists, that neither Germany 
nor Kussia can finance any Japanese aggression, 
and that England's completed sohdarity with 
Australia and Canada has come to exceed Lon- 
don's interest in the Anglo-Japanese alliance, 
then the demagogue will drop the Yellow Peril 
as a means of exciting audiences, and turn to 
more timely subjects. You can trust a dema- 
gogue, of whatever country, to sense and get on 
board of current topics and to desert those of 
past interest! 

This book has carefully eschewed that form of 
pacifist lullaby which certain unwise American 
friends of Japan are so fond of singing, and 
tries, first by admitting the dread of a Yellow 
Peril, and then by showing the existing checks 
upon it, to remove any reasonable fear thereof, 
and therefore, by logical and not by hysterical 
methods, to clear the way for a readjustment of 
our national attitude toward Japan. It shows 
but poor judgment to deny that there exist many 
Japanese military jingoes and a Yellow Press, 



212 THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 

and that military success and territorial expan- 
sion are highly popular among those brave 
islanders. But they are more than offset by 
other elements among their own people, and they 
are beginning to reahze it. 

In the last analysis, if Japanese jingoes, 
dwellers in a land which Admiral Mahan said 
"comes to its present with the same inheritance 
as Germany from its past, of the submergence 
of the individual in the mass," should succeed in 
stirring up their people against the white dwell- 
ers about the Pacific, what chance would they 
have against lands where the development of 
individual freedom and rights as a basis for 
advancing the Commonwealth has yielded such 
practical results as in our land and in the British 
Empire as represented by Australia and Canada? 
Nor must it be forgotten that while the only pos- 
sible source of the Yellow Peril (certain north- 
westerly islands of the Pacific) is offset by 
Anglo-Saxons down the southern half of the 
same side of that ocean and the northern half 
of its easterly side, the other or southerly half 
of the eastern coastline is peopled by another 
white race, which although of Latin and not 
Anglo-Saxon extraction, would lend no aid in a 
racial struggle between yellow and white races 
to the former. No, the balance against any pos- 



THE YELLOW PERIL BOGEY 213 

sible Yellow Peril is so great as entirely to re- 
move any reasonable dread of it, and therefore 
we may safely and promptly proceed to a better 
understanding between ourselves and the pro- 
gressive Japanese. 



CHAPTEK IX 

A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

The matter of Philippine independence has 
been much complicated of late by the fact that 
the Japanese, as a result of secret treaties made 
in 1917 with England, France, Italy and Russia, 
hold the Marshall and Caroline islands owned by 
Germany when the great war broke out. Our 
Far Eastern policy must recognize this new fact 
and confront it. The location of these islands, 
lying as they do across our line of communica- 
tion with the Philippines, falls within the spirit 
if not the letter of the valuable "Lodge Amend- 
ment" to the Monroe Doctrine adopted in July, 
1912, by the United States Senate, because in 
the language thereof it "might threaten the com- 
munications ... of the United States." This 
Amendment refers to places in the American 
Continents, but it is nevertheless certain that 
"the Government of the United States could 
not see, without grave concern" anything which 
"might threaten the communications of the 
United States" in so vital a link as that connect- 

214 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 215 

ing Manila with Hawaii. This encircling of the 
Philippines by Japan's advance in that quarter 
inspires inquiry as to their intentions, and means 
that the former's independence is no longer an 
isolated question capable of separate considera- 
tion and treatment, but that it is now part and 
parcel of the Japanese question, which is the next 
great international problem demanding adjust- 
ment. 

Filipinos like to dismiss this danger of theirs 
by telhng you the Japanese don't want their 
lands, and yet, when the protection of those 
lands against excessive Japanese purchases by 
Philippine legislative acts was being opposed by 
our State Department during the winter of 1918- 
1919, their leader and Speaker of Assembly, Mr. 
Osmena, cabled their agent in Washington, Mr. 
Quezon, President of their Senate, that it was 
"absolutely vital" such legislation be permitted. 
"Absolutely vital" means that there was danger 
from these purchases by Japanese, and this was 
true especially in Mindanao, the great hemp 
centre. And yet now these pohticians tell you 
there is no such danger, since the Japanese do 
not want their islands I Why, then, was legisla- 
tion to keep them out "vitally necessary," and, 
further, why were several important Japanese 
newspapers seriously discussing, during the sum- 



216 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

mer of 1919, whether the United States would 
sell them the PhiHppines at a fair price, and 
wondering what a fair price for them would be? 
Both Mr. Omena and Mr. Quezon publicly ex- 
pressed delight when on December 8, 1919, the 
cable brought the news to Manila that the 
desired legislation had become a law. No, they 
were right when they appraised this question as 
a vital one for their people. It is, and Philippine 
independence has become for America an in- 
tegral part of the Japanese question, and can 
no longer be considered apart from it. 

But in order to get a fair view of the situation 
as it stands to-day, let us assume that our 
withdrawal from that archipelago is not part of 
a larger problem, and consider what sort of a 
representative republic would ensue if we left 
them without our protection. 

The determined, energetic Anglo-Saxon, rep- 
resented by the Australians and New Zealand- 
ers, controls the barrier chain of islands lying off 
Asia from the equator southward, and the virile, 
aggressive Japanese hold the northerly part of 
that chain down as far south as the Philippines, 
which alone are inhabited by a race no stronger 
than the original mainlanders of the Asian con- 
tinent. This weak link in the island chain has 
long been in foreign hands, viz., first the Span- 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 217 

iards and then, more recently, our own. We are 
not there as the result of any land-grabbing ex- 
pedition, but because Admiral Dewey on May 1, 
1898, in response to the famous order to seek out 
and destroy the Spanish fleet, thoroughly obeyed 
his instructions and put us in such complete 
possession that President McKinley, finding no 
honorable exit, reluctantly decided the following 
year that we must continue in charge of those 
distant possessions. Of course, we need suitable 
coal and oil stations for our navy at selected 
points all around the world, but we must all ad- 
mit that the Philippine question as a whole is 
for us nothing more or less than a search for an 
honorable solution of a serious problem. Dare 
we make them independent, and then leave them 
to their fate, or what shall we do? None of us, 
in the bottom of our hearts, really wants great 
territory so far from home. Naval stations, yes ; 
trade, yes — ^but not huge colonial possessions, 
especially in a climate too tropical for us to col- 
onize, and too vast and distant for us to defend. 
An honorable exit would suit most of us, but its 
quest has certainly been comphcated by Japan 
receiving the mandate of the Caroline and Mar- 
shall Islands, taken over by her from the Ger- 
mans during the late war. This looks like a 
threat against our continued occupation of the 



218 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

Philippines or their independence if we retire. 
Not only do those islands lie athwart our line of 
communication between the Philippines and Ha- 
waii, but also the Japanese have at Jaluit, in the 
Marshalls, a naval station only 2,100 miles from 
Pearl Harbor, our great naval base in the Ha- 
waiian Islands, and 1,400 miles nearer thereto 
(and therefore to California) than the strong 
Japanese navy formerly enjoyed. So long as 
the Japanese retain these islands they are not 
only threatening Hawaii, but are also serving 
notice of what may happen to the Philippines 
soon after we move out, if we leave nothing 
behind us to protect their independence but ten 
million natives of scores of races speaking in- 
numerable languages, and with only a small per- 
centage of their number educated. They will 
share the fate of Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, 
Shantung, etc. — they will become Japanese. It 
would probably be better for them than their 
independence. But this book is not written for 
the purpose of discussing how to benefit the 
Filipinos, but seeks, from a pro-Japanese angle, 
to improve relations between Japan and the 
United States, as a condition precedent to a 
sound Far Eastern policy. And what effect 
upon those relations would be had by the pub- 
lication, some fine day (and that, too, an early 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 219 

one!) after a Utopian policy led us to give the 
Filipino his independence, that, one or more 
Japanese traders having been murdered on 
some island of the Philippine group, the Japa- 
nese navy had landed marines to protect her 
merchants and to demand reparation? The 
Filipinos could not assure protection to any 
foreigner anywhere throughout most of the 
archipelago, so there the world would be, back 
in a somewhat familiar international situation. 
The Germans took all of Shantung because two 
missionaries were murdered in Kiachao — could 
one really blame an Oriental nation from follow- 
ing the illustrious example of an Occidental one ? 
And what would our people say to this? Per- 
haps the reader may reply, "They would say 
nothing, because the Philippine responsibility 
would no longer be ours." But is that really 
true? It is more than doubtful. The anti- Japa- 
nese among us would not fail to seize upon this 
as one more weapon in their arsenal of attack 
upon the Island Kingdom's alleged aggressive- 
ness, etc. 

How do the Filipinos feel toward the Japa- 
nese, and how is it reciprocated? During my 
stay in Japan I was interested to notice from the 
daily newspapers how friendly a reception was 
being everywhere accorded to a party of Filipino 



220 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

ladies and gentlemen, the Honorable Sergio 
Osmena, Speaker of the Philippine Assembly, 
Major and Mrs. A, C. Torres, the Honorable 
Galicano Apacible, Secretary of Agriculture, 
etc. I saw them at several places, and the 
Major, a well-built soldierly figm^e, always wore 
his American uniform of the Philippine Na- 
tional Guard. Not only were they of course en- 
tertained by the Speaker of the Japanese Lower 
House, and by many other officials in Tokyo, but 
also they were given other and more striking 
proofs of friendly esteem, such as being per- 
mitted to penetrate the Holy of Holies in the 
sanctuary of lyeyasu's gorgeous mausolea on the 
pine-clad hills of Nikko, and as being feted by 
the Governor General of Korea, where every 
facility was given them for seeing the beneficent 
results of Japanese rule. A Japanese Baron, 
v/ho recently has had cause to dislike America 
because of a public slight officially given him, 
told me in Tokj^o that he had met these distin- 
guished Philippine visitors, and that they had 
told him they were entirely satisfied with Amer- 
ican control of their islands. I could not help 
wondering just how it came about that these 
Filipino officials happened to discuss American 
control with a Japanese, and especially with one 
known to have received unpleasant treatment at 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 221 

the hands of the American Government! It is 
a grievous fault to be over-curious, but one must 
confess to a wish to have heard all of that par- 
ticular conversation. This visit of Mr. Osmefia 
to Japan has pecuHar interest to readers of Ka- 
law's quaintly partisan "Self- Government in the 
Philippines," a naive argument that all recent 
progress and improvement there is due solely to 
the FiHpino governing class, without admitting 
that this politically active group is but a trifling 
minority of a heterogeneous population incapa- 
ble of national assimilation. He points out that 
the Assembly has come to be considered as 
peculiarly the pohtical expression of the people's 
wiU, and its Speaker as the real leader of all the 
Filipinos. This would give more significance to 
the Japanese visit of Mr. Osmena and to his 
reception there than would appear to the un- 
enhghtened onlooker. The Manila Times of 
October 10, 1919, speaking editorially of a 
letter written home by Mr. Osmeiia during his 
tour in Japan to Mr. Quezon, President of the 
Senate, reporting that he "has been treated with 
distinguished courtesy by Japanese officialdom," 
says that *'the trend of events in Asia is toward 
increasing intimacy between Japan and these 
Islands. . . . As the Filipinos expect independ- 
ence, and as they are willing, according to the 



222 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

statements of several of their leading statesmen, 
to accept it without any previously agreed pro- 
tectorate by the United States, it is well for them 
to cultivate the most friendly relations with the 
Japanese, and to seek in return sincere friend- 
ship. . . . While the Filipinos themselves are 
notable for their courtesy and hospitality, with- 
out design or fear, the horoscope of the race now 
cast by the conjunction of political bodies bodes 
ominously for any people who have not either the 
friendship of the needy strong, or the protection 
of a paternal and powerful altruist." This 
editorial upon Mr. Osmeiia's letter home was 
approvingly quoted in a Tokyo newspaper of 
October 30, 1919, under the heading, "Japanese 
may use Philippine lands," and therefore some 
people jumped to the hasty conclusion that be- 
cause Mr. Osmeiia, the "boss" of the Filipino 
political machine, was accompanied on his Japa- 
nese tour by the Filipino Secretary of Agricul- 
ture, he was preparing to play off an alliance 
with the land-hungry Japanese against American 
opponents of Philippine independence. But 
how could this be true? — for Osmefia, before 
making an agreement with Japan to respect Fili- 
pino independence, would doubtless be "given 
pause" by the agreements to preserve the integ- 
rity of China which Japan made with France 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 223 

June 10, 1907, with Russia July 30, 1907, with 
the United States ISTovember 30, 1908, and with 
Great Britain July 13, 1911. 

Besides, although Japanese propaganda pub- 
licists love to play up their need for more terri- 
tory into which their crowded home population 
may expand, in practice they only want to go 
where there is a higher standard of living and 
wage scale, so that they may profit by the differ- 
ence in their favor. One proof of this is that al- 
though Korea, the size of the British Isles, has 
only 18,000,000 inhabitants as against 47,000,000 
in Great Britain, and is distant but eleven hours 
from Shimonoseki, only 336,872 Japanese (1918 
statistics) have availed themselves of that nearby 
opportunity to become less crowded. The Ko- 
reans can underlive the Japanese and will accept 
less wages, so the latter do not care to compete 
with him, and the Filipino has the same advan- 
tages. What is true of Korea holds good also 
in Manchuria, which, although under Japanese 
control and not densely populated, has never- 
theless attracted but 310,155 Japanese (1918 
statistics ) from their homeland nearby. Crowd- 
ing of population does not necessitate emigration, 
so long as the homeland is prosperous. Take 
for an example Germany, a country whose mili- 
tary clique were always reaching out for more 



224s A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

colonial territory upon precisely this same plea of 
excessive crowding of a rapidly growing popula- 
tion at home. What light do cold-blooded sta- 
tistics throw upon this claim? In 1880, 200,000 
Germans emigrated, but in 1910, although the 
home population had increased during those 
thirty years by nearly that many millions, only 
20,000 Germans left their homes to live abroad, 
and more than that number of foreigners came 
to live in Germany, thus turning it from an emi- 
gration to an immigration country. There was 
extensive emigration from Germany when she 
had only 40,000,000 people, and none at all when 
she had 70,000,000! Why? Because the im- 
proved conditions of life, owing to her great 
commercial strides during those three decades, 
enabled her to support a much greater popula- 
tion, and not only kept her own people con- 
tented, but attracted others from outside. 

Japan is not excessively overpopulated. Parts 
of it are sparsely populated, and one-third of 
its arable land is not cultivated. In Japan there 
are 356 inhabitants per square mile, in Germany 
there are 310. It is estimated that Belgium has 
a population of 659 per square mile, and raises 
food for only one-fifth of them, which is less 
than half of the number per square mile for which 
Germany raises food, but Japan does even better. 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 225 

No, density of population does not necessarily 
call for more territory outside one's borders. 
England has 370 per square mile, but her emigra- 
tion is less than it was when she had far fewer. 
Holland has 474 per square miles (second only 
to Belgium among European countries) but 
Hollanders almost never emigrate. Perhaps of 
even greater significance than all the foregoing 
statistics is the seldom noticed fact that the four- 
teen milHon Jews, one of the world's greatest 
races, have no separate territory exclusively 
their own, nor do most of them seem to want that 
sort of "a place in the sun." No, if the wheel of 
Fate should ever turn over the Philippine Is- 
lands to the Japanese, they will go there as a 
governing class, as in Korea and Formosa and 
Manchuria, and not as settlers seeking escape 
from overcrowding at home. 

No such large piece of territory anywhere 
around the Pacific has been allowed to remain 
in weak hands, and a Philippine Republic would 
be the weakest of all governments, nor is this 
difficult to prove. We have been learning much 
lately of the need for recognition of racial con- 
centration, and that peoples of the same race 
are entitled to separate nationhood. No more 
Austro-Hungarian combinations are desired, cer- 
tain in their internal inter-race disputes to breed 



226 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

disorders difficult to confine within their own 
borders. And yet the Philippine Repubhc would 
furnish just such an objectionable medley of 
many languages, plus the additional unworkable 
feature of component races running the entire 
gamut from university-bred Spanish-speaking 
politicians down through innumerable gradations 
to the Igorrote head-hunting savage. A Philip- 
pine Hepublic unprotected by some strong Power 
would not last long, and, indeed, might prove 
a serious menace to a peaceful Pacific. And 
a peaceful Pacific is nothing but an after-dinner 
orator's dream unless there be laid for it the 
enduring foundation of better Japanese-Ameri- 
can feeling, surely impossible of realization if 
their military party should engineer the taking 
of the Philippine Islands after we got out 
of them. Only cowardly dreamers or absent- 
minded, distant-bodied ideahsts think that haul- 
ing down the Stars and Stripes at Manila, and 
hoisting in its place the flag of a heterogeneous 
and undefended Philippine republic would afford 
a guarantee that we were finally through with 
them. It was necessary to free Cuba not once, 
but twice, and we have since then kept out of the 
island. It was a splendid thing to do — one of 
history's great object lessons of national good 
faith. But Cuba lies very near us and very far 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? WL 

from so land-hungry a Power as Japan. The 
exact opposite is the case of the Philippines — 
they are far from us, and form nearby links of 
the long chain of islands to the north which 
Japan already holds. It is only a few hours 
steaming from Formosa to Luzon. No, Cuba 
cannot fairly be used as argument to encourage 
a departure from our present status on that dis- 
tant island barrier chain. We ought not to leave 
the FiHpino to his own defenseless independence 
unless and until he is fit for it, and also some 
plan is devised to guarantee it to him. 

In order to consider the question of when he 
will be fit for independence, it is fair to approach 
it from the angle of the Chinese Republic. How 
is a republic succeeding in that nearby Oriental 
land? 

The Chinese are a people accustomed to change 
their rulers so frequently as to disgust their con- 
servative neighbors, the Japanese, whose present 
Imperial dynasty has for twenty-five centuries 
uninterruptedly ruled Japan. The Chinese have 
made 26 changes during the last 4,000 years, not 
only substituting one native dynasty for another, 
but actually replacing Chinese with foreign 
Manchus or Mongolians or Tartars, etc., and 
finally, in 1911, ending up with what is called a 
republic. This willingness to change govern- 



228 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

mental systems ought to indicate such a flexible 
and adjustable state of the national mind as to 
make for a successful republic, but what is the 
result? — ^What is the Chinese Republic and what 
is happening to it? Substitute a practical for 
our usual sentimental point of view due to long 
continuing cordial relations between it and the 
United States, which has tried in vain and alone 
to preserve China's territorial integrity. Let us 
face the truth. What has happened to China? — - 
all its territory is already apportioned between 
various European Powers, or else they have put 
upon it their tabu signs, marking out their 
"spheres of influence," and forbidding alienation 
thereof to other nations. Last of all is the ap- 
pearance of Japan as a substitute in Shantung 
for Germany, which she ousted from that prov- 
ince. To digress for a moment, — how in the 
world can you blame Japan? She sees all the 
other nations grabbing great pieces of China, 
and of course, in self-defense, she also grabs 
those pieces near her own territories to prevent 
some strong European nation from forestalling 
her. To this extent she has every right to set 
up a super-Monroe Doctrine of her own. I say 
"super-Monroe Doctrine" because, without the 
qualification "super," she is improperly using the 
term Monroe Doctrine. In no manner to-day do 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 229 

Japan's actions in the Far East resemble ours in 
South and Central America. If you doubt this, 
read the text of the outrageous 21 demands which 
she served upon China January 18, 1915. It is 
inconceivable that any American administration 
should desire or attempt to treat Argentina or 
Brazil as Japan has Manchuria and Shantung. 
I strongly beheve that Japan has, by reason of 
geographical proximity, certain rights to especial 
consideration in the Far East that we have not, 
but I would be but a poor friend of Japan if I 
applauded an attempt on her part to employ 
the altruistic Monroe Doctrine as a camouflage 
phrase for certain recently exhibited tendencies 
of Japanese militaristic development. 

Well, a glance at the map reveals what has 
happened to a large, fairly homogeneous Chinese 
population, seemingly, by a common written lan- 
guage, hterature, habits, traditions, etc., suited 
to form a strong republic. Why should we 
expect anything better to happen to the map of 
the Philippine Islands, once our flag is hauled 
down and an unprotected Phihppine Republic 
set up? As contrasted with one uninterrupted 
expanse of Chinese territory, with provinces 
separated by no impassible natural boundaries, 
we have the Philippine archipelago consisting of 
3,141 charted islands. Although 90% of its 



230 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

total land area is on the eleven largest islands, 
those islands, separated by wide channels, are 
themselves subdivided by chains of mountains 
and other natural obstacles tending to keep its 
many races isolated and apart from each other. 
The whole group has a land surface a little larger 
than the British Isles, and the chief island, Lu- 
zon, is somewhat larger than Pennsylvania. Re- 
cent statistics show the following totals for the 
principal races: Visayan, 3,200,000; Tagalog, 
1,500,000; Ilocano, 803,000; Bicol, 566,000; 
Pangasinan, 34*3,000; Pampangan, 280,000; 
Cagayan, 160,000 ; Zambolan, 49,000. There are 
numerous subdivisions of the above races, and 
scores of languages and religions to help make 
"confusion worse confounded." The tribal lan- 
guage variations are so numerous and so local 
that a day's journey on foot brings one away from 
one language and into a strange one. If a truly 
representative republic is not succeeding on the 
Chinese mainland with everything in its favor, 
what chance has it in this tangle of islands where 
nature, both on land and by sea, conspires with 
a multiplicity of languages, races and religions 
to prevent homogeneity or cohesion? 

The voting statistics of the Chinese Republic 
show less than one per cent of the population as 
participating in the elections of what are, with 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 231 

unintentional humor, called their representatives. 
How much larger percentage of the Igorrotes, 
Mores, Tagalogs, Visayans, Ilocanos, etc., are 
able intelligently to exercise the franchise? Both 
those alleged republics would have less percent- 
age of intelligent votes than Mexico has had dur- 
ing the saddest days of a down-trodden peonage. 
Anything that any enemy of Mexico's sover- 
eignty could ever allege concerning her govern- 
ment as being by an oligarchy of a small, educated 
class (the so-called cientificos) would be true to- 
morrow in Manila if we withdrew. So much for 
a Philippine Republic's future as viewed by any- 
one conveniently near to a map of China as it is 
now painted over with European and Japanese 
"spheres of influence" and outright appropria- 
tions. 

Let us see how the Filipinos are shaping up 
their governmental system to meet the difficulty 
caused by their multiplicity of languages, races 
and religions. Mr. Quezon, President of the 
Senate, honored me with a luncheon at the 
Nacionalista Club, the headquarters of the party 
machine which runs the government and con- 
trols all the members of the legislative body ex- 
cept four, and of which club Mr. Osmena, 
Speaker of the Assembly, is President. These 
two gentlemen called my attention to the similar- 



232 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

ity of racial type displayed in the faces of the 
Cabinet officers. Judges and numerous Senators 
and Assemblymen seated around the tables, all 
of whom spoke fluent Spanish, and many of them 
fair English. He was quite right, they were re- 
markably similar in type, and inquiry revealed 
that by compHance with certain residential re- 
quirements, easy to meet, there was nothing to 
prevent men (selected by the Nacionalista par- 
ty!) who spent most of their time in Manila, 
representing constituencies located in distant 
parts of the archipelago. In other words, the 
JSTacionahsta machine resembles an English party 
machine, which decides in London who shall be 
selected as its candidates to represent districts 
far from that centre of government, with the 
result that many of them are really Londoners, 
although maintaining pohtical residence in the 
constituency they represent in Parliament. As 
a result of the operation of the Jones Bill, which 
became a law in 1916, about all that is now left 
of American government in the Phihppines is 
the Governor-General, the Vice-Go vernor- Gen- 
eral, the Auditor and the Vice- Auditor, but they 
control the Treasury, and the Governor retains 
a salutary veto power. Everything else has been 
turned over to the Filipinos, which means in 
plain political English that the Nacionalista 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 233 

party, from its headquarters at the club of that 
name, runs everything as neatly and smoothly 
as the Boss of Tammany Hall runs his similarly 
close corporation. And Mr. Osmefia, or his 
successor in the presidency of the Nacionalista 
political group of Spanish blood, will continue 
to be the boss of the Filipinos. 

And what has happened in those islands since 
that measure of self-government has been given 
to the natives and taken over by the l^acional- 
istas? Everything has gradually dropped off in 
efficiency. Before we went there it was a land of 
no roads and no postoffices. We built fine roads 
and installed an excellent postal service. Now 
the once splendid automobile roads around 
Manila have lost their surface and are showing 
signs of wear, and the postal service is being 
severely criticized. Almost all the American 
schoolteachers have been dismissed, so that Eng- 
lish is now being taught to the children by Fili- 
pinos who speak it imperfectly. The poHce force 
and fire department we created in Manila became 
remarkably efficient under their American lead- 
ers, but with those leaders gone both forces have 
deteriorated, and unpleasant stories of graft are 
current. Manila Harbor is an important one, 
and is visited by many ships. Under Amer- 
ican management the business of this port was 



234 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

promptly handled. We anchored just outside 
the breakwater at 7:45 a. m., on a perfect day, 
and no other ship was waiting ahead of us to 
delay the operations of the Filipino officials, and 
yet it was not until two hours and five minutes 
later that delays between perfunctory official 
visitations permitted us to up-anchor and steam 
inside. At no other Pacific port did we en- 
counter such dilatory officialism. 

Mr. Quezon and Mr. Osmena, at the luncheon 
just described, made eloquent speeches in Span- 
ish of the type familiar to those who have lived 
in Latin- American repubhcs. They agreed that 
their party was unequivocally committed to com- 
plete independence, that there was no danger of 
Japanese interference therewith after our with- 
drawal, and that although they would like the 
friendly support of America in the future, even 
without it they were wilHng to take their chances. 
Mr. Quezon said that all Filipinos believed that 
Americans had become so interested in the 
Philippines that even after withdrawal their sup- 
port could always be counted on if necessary. 
In my brief remarks I ventured to reply that 
the war just concluded had afforded a striking 
demonstration of the superiority of interde- 
pendence as illustrated by Australia, Canada, 
India and Great Britain, over the independence 



X PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 235 

of Belgium and Greece. Also it seemed my 
duty to point out that, contrary to the general 
belief held by Spanish-speaking peoples, the 
Americans are really as proud as any other peo- 
ple, and that therefore, if upon the intimation 
that our room was better than our company, and, 
at the express wish of the Filipinos, we hauled 
down the Stars and Stripes in their archipelago, 
American pride would prevent its going there 
again, even to protect the islands from a control 
less agreeable than ours. Strange to say, this 
point of view seemed never to have struck them, 
for they showed their surprise in no uncertain 
manner, and later Mr. Quezon and several others 
stated they had never heard it before. Another 
American present, and one who is in complete 
accord with a policy of American withdrawal, 
confirmed my statement, which still further sur- 
prised them. As I looked about upon the seri- 
ous, intelligent faces of this group that control 
their nation's destiny, it was impossible to refrain 
from wondering if they would be the men of 
whom later generations would say "we enjoyed, 
but they discarded, the close friendship of one of 
the world's greatest powers I Why didn't they 
follow the example of Canada and Australia and 
prefer the secure benefits of interdependence 



236 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

with that great power to the dangers of inde- 
pendence?" 

Well, suppose we are unwilling to turn loose 
the Filipino lamb unprotected in the forest, and 
further suppose that we, in manly fashion, admit 
we would like to retire to our own continent, 
what can fairly be suggested by a practical man 
living in the twentieth century, who prefers an 
honest plan that will work to sentimental make- 
shifts that only breed trouble? The Japanese 
are now a great factor in this problem, and it 
seems to me that they like frankness on the part 
of foreigners, especially if first convinced they 
speak with friendly intent, and for this reason 1 
made bold to express the following views at a 
luncheon of Japanese given in Tokyo during 
Christmas week of 1919: 

"The hope of better and lasting relations be- 
tween our two countries, so pregnant with valu- 
able results for both of us, depends upon some 
safe and sure arrangement for the future of the 
Philippine Islands, to which, when they are ready 
for it, we have promised independence. If and 
when we move out, it seems to many of us that 
it would not be long before Expansionists among 
you would precipitate some move inevitably lead- 
ing to your moving in. If that were done, it 
would take more than one generation to over- 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 237 

come the increased estrangement that such ac- 
tion would create between you and us who have 
worked so hard for the Fihpinos. Please don't 
understand me as one of those international busy- 
bodies who oppose territorial expansion by Ja- 
pan. I believe that President Roosevelt was 
right when he led in recognizing your annexation 
of Korea, and, like most Americans, I was glad 
you defeated Russia and ousted her from Man- 
churia. May I venture to think that the increase 
in your Siberian forces points to a possible per- 
manence of your power in that chaos of gov- 
ernment, that anarchy-distracted region? So 
clearly has Russia recently demonstrated for us 
all the danger in making the world too free for 
democracy, that to-day it is doubtful if your 
substituting government for anarchy in Eastern 
Siberia next your own possessions would meet 
with serious opposition abroad. But why not 
seize this opportunity to readjust your relations 
with America, whose friendship is, perhaps, of 
some value? Expand, if you like, but not in 
the direction that arouses suspicion in America, 
proud of her 'labor of love' in modernizing the 
Phihppines. Do you gentlemen realize that in 
taking the Caroline and Marshall islands in ac- 
cordance with your secret agreements of 1917 
with Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia 



238 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

(but not with the United States, more concerned 
than any of them), you have cut our line of com- 
munications to the Philippines? — that this action 
is a geographical threat against the future inde- 
pendence of the Philippines because obviously 
embracing them within your sphere of influence, 
and that, therefore, your taking of the Carolines 
and the Marshalls arms anti-Japanese critics with 
an opportunity to inject their virus into the 
Philippine independence question? Are those 
German islands worth this to you? Wouldn't 
you rather have Eastern Siberia plus American 
friendship, plus the business cooperation of limit- 
less American capital? We don't want the Caro- 
lines and Marshalls, but if you relinquish them 
to international control or to Australia (an 
Anglo-Saxon power) it would wipe out at one 
stroke a cause of grave disquiet to those who, 
like myself, are vastly more interested in Japa- 
nese-American friendship than they are in the 
Philippine question. After such a forward- 
looking move on your part, you, AustraHa and 
ourselves could enter into such a three-cornered 
guarantee of Philippine independence as would 
more surely safeguard the future peace of the 
Pacific than any other one act." 

If Japan should decide to rehnquish to Aus- 
tralia, our Anglo - Saxon cousin, the Caroline 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 239 

and Marshall islands, and thereafter Japan, 
Australia and the United States should unite in 
jointly guaranteeing Philippine independence, 
a safe solution could be found of that difficult 
problem, which, if left unsolved (as it would be 
if the Filipinos were granted an unprotected 
independence), would always endanger Japan- 
America friendship. There is no doubt that such 
a friendship lies at the very root of peace in the 
Pacific. 

There is yet another business-like solution of 
the Philippine difficulty, which, when launched 
by me December 30, 1915, during a speech before 
the American Society of International Law and 
three affiliated societies, elicited more than one 
hundred favorable editorial comments in news- 
papers of all shades of political thought. That 
plan was for an exchange of those distant islands 
by us for the European possessions in and around 
the Caribbean Sea. Though the Philippines are 
far from us, they are administratively adjacent 
to the British in Hong Kong or the French in 
Tonkin or the Dutch in Borneo. It is essential 
to the security of our future that the waters wash- 
ing our southern coastline become a Pan-Amer- 
ican lake, entirely freed from European politics, 
or the conflicting interests of those peoples living 
across the Atlantic. Not necessarily an Amer- 



24.0 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

ican lake, as some writers now insist, but one 
whose interests are entirely controlled by our- 
selves and our sister republics to the south of us. 
Neither they nor we should risk any future Euro- 
pean conflicts being staged so unpleasantly near 
our shores as would have been the case if, for 
instance, the naval battle of the Falkland Isles 
had taken place off British Honduras, so near to 
our Panama Canal. 

Since my suggestion was made, our Govern- 
ment has most wisely purchased the Danish West 
Indian Islands, so that the onlj^ powers now left 
to deal with are England, France and Holland. 
England owns most of the islands in those 
waters and also British Honduras and British 
Guiana. None of those possessions are profit- 
able ones, and the results of her colonial policy 
in her Guiana and Honduras holdings are in 
unpleasant contrast with the uniform successes 
of that policy in other parts of the world. In 
1895, British Guiana would have precipitated a 
rupture of our friendship with Great Britain had 
not President Cleveland handled the situation so 
admirably. French Guiana is chiefly known for 
its penal settlements, in one of which Dreyfus 
unjustly languished so long. The French have 
brought many Siamese and Chinese coolies into 
that colony, just as the Hollanders have intro- 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 241 

duced 15,000 Javanese into her Guiana, both 
of them following England's example, for she 
transported to British Guiana over 125,000 East 
Indian coolies. Does such admixture of tropical 
Orientals of the lowest classes improve the man- 
hood or civilization of those colonies? or was it 
done for any other purpose than to exploit them 
for their European owners? Isn't such action an 
affront to the fundamentals of Pan- American- 
ism? It certainly is in flat contradiction to the 
ethnological policy of Argentina and the United 
States, and for that matter, of both Canada and 
Australia as well. How many miles of railroad 
have these European masters built to develop the 
Guianas, a combined territory of more than 171,- 
000 square miles, or about the size of Alabama, 
Georgia and Florida put together? There are 
less than 200 miles in all the three colonies (none 
at all in French Guiana), which compares un- 
favorably with Venezuela's 600 miles or Colom- 
bia's 700 miles. British Honduras has less than 
one-tenth the railway mileage of her neighbor, 
Honduras. The school systems in the three 
Guianas are either far below the average of the 
neighboring Latin- American republics, or do not 
exist at all. Venezuela, next door, has over 1,700 
schools, while Colombia, next beyond to the west, 
has over 5,000, and both of them possess ancient 



242 A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 

universities. Neither the Dutch islands of the 
Caribbean nor the French ones are proving 
profitable colonies, for the home governments are 
constantly required to meet large deficits in their 
administration. It would be better for the peo- 
ples of all those European possessions if they 
were released from their present allegiance. It 
would free us from any more dangers to our 
European friendships, like the British Guiana 
incident of 1895, and it would, by our payment 
for their release, reduce the staggering war debt 
now owed us by England and France, and help 
Holland to meet the heavy expense incurred by 
the long-continued mobilization of her army from 
1914 till 1919. It would, therefore, benefit all 
concerned in or affected by the transaction, and 
now is the psychological moment to arrange it, 
when Europe owes us the money, and it would 
be merely a matter of book-keeping to adjust it. 
Probably the enactment of the Jones Law, with 
its recital of a promised independence, has so far 
committed our country to that policy as to pre- 
clude our trading the Philippine Islands to Hol- 
land, France and England for their Caribbean 
possessions. But whether or not a trade of the 
Philippines be involved, and even if it must be 
done by plain outright purchase, the Caribbean 
Sea ought now and without delay to be turned 



A PHILIPPINE REPUBLIC? 243 

into a Pan-American lake, by freeing the Gui- 
anas and British Honduras from European dom- 
ination, and by hoisting the American flag over 
the European-owned islands of that sea. 

To ensure peace and progress in the Pacific, 
a firm friendship and cooperation should and 
must be estabhshed between Japan and ourselves, 
and to accomplish this end there is necessary the 
removal of that stumbling block, the Philippine 
problem. For this reason it seems best to take 
the more direct of the two business-like routes to 
that desirable end by refraining from opposition 
to Japan's expansion northwesterly (which, in- 
deed, is none of our business!) if she will with- 
draw from her southeasterly development by 
transferring the Caroline and Marshall islands 
to international control or Australia, and then, 
with this geographical threat to peace removed, 
all three of us, Japan, Australia and the United 
States, unite in guaranteeing independence to the 
Filipino. That ought to satisfy all four parties 
concerned, assure peace in the Pacific, progress 
for American trade in cooperation with Japan, 
and add another star of altruistic achievement to 
the American escutcheon. 



CHAPTER X 

A JAPANESE POINT OF VIEW 

In the study of every question it is of the 
utmost importance to learn the points of view 
entertained by all sides, and especially of the 
extremists. To this end there was made a col- 
lection of clippings from Japanese newspapers 
during the last six months of 1919 in order to 
learn just what their strongest anti- American 
articles were saying. From this collection the 
following one has been selected for reproduction, 
because it seemed the most fully to present the 
anti- American case, and also because of the na- 
tion-wide importance of the newspaper in which 
it appeared — the Osaka Mainicliij, which printed 
it November 12, 1919. Osaka is the centre of 
the modern productivity of its country, a bee- 
hive of industry. This journal is not only most 
influential in that progressive city, but also is 
widely read all over Japan, as I was informed 
by a Japanese coal-mine owner of Nagasaki 
(down on the island of Kyushu, in the southwest 
corner of the Empire), a literary man of Tokyo, 

244 



A JAPANESE POINT OF VIEW 245 

a leading ocean navigator, an exporter, etc. 
Read this, and learn what is nowadays being said 
of us in Japan — let us follow Bobbie Burns' ad- 
vice and "see oursels as ithers see us." 

"Wliile the important and urgent question of 
promoting and perpetuating the harmony of hu- 
manity and the peace of the world is receiving 
careful attention, it is regrettable to note that 
Japanese-American relations have been growing 
in gi'avity, especially because the tension is being 
intensified by the racial hatred and the anti- 
Japanese schemes of the Americans. 

"One cannot forget that Japanese-American 
relations were once so harmonious that much was 
said about it. When we remember those good 
days, it is impossible not to feel as if we lost a 
precious stone or to have the same feeling as 
parents who lost a child of unusual promise. The 
present straining of relations between Japan and 
America is partly due to the excess of prosperity 
in both countries ; it seems as if the prosperity of 
one country is too great to be curbed within its 
borders, and is going to get into collision with the 
prosperity of another country. The situation is 
not tempered by feUow-feeling nor by self-con- 
trol; on the contrary, hatred and contempt are 
predominant. We have always faced America 
with friendly moderation and self-control, but 



246 A JAPANESE POINT OF VIEW 

the Americans have always treated us with arro- 
gance, coercion, hatred and contempt. Unless 
we agree to sit at their feet, they apparently in- 
tend to exclude us entirely, and to reduce us to a 
position where we shall no more be able to pro- 
test against inhumanity and injustice than beasts 
are. In spite of their indignation the Japanese 
will patiently protest against the American atti- 
tude, and while preserving self-control on their 
own part they earnestly hope that the Americans 
will reconsider their attitude and return to the 
path of reason and equity for the sake of hu- 
manity's happiness and the world's peace. 

"History shows, however, that America's atti- 
tude toward Japan has been aggressive, insulting 
and coercive throughout. (1) When Commo- 
dore Perry visited Japan, we benevolently inter- 
preted his visit as an attempt to open our door 
to the world. But the fact that there were no 
serious developments between the two countries 
was due to a change of administration, the policy 
of the new President being different from that of 
his predecessor. The total intention of Perry's 
fleet was to threaten us and to take the Okinawa 
islands by force in order to coerce this country 
if we did not obey his orders. 

"(2) America assisted the independence plot 
in Hawaii, and used it to realize the annexation 



A JAPANESE POINT OF VIEW 24T 

of the islands by America. It may be said that 
this action on the part of America embodied the 
spirit in which America threatened to take the 
Okinawa Islands. 

"(3) In obtaining Guam and the Philippines 
in the American-Spanish War, America secured 
another stepping-stone for development in the 
Pacific and also laid the foundation of her activi- 
ties in China. On the other hand, this state of 
affairs was calculated to obstruct the southern 
development of Japan and to impair her rela- 
tions with China; in other words, to hinder 
Japan's activities on the east, west and south. 
At that time Japanese-American relations were 
not so strained as yet. Moreover, the Gentle- 
man's Agreement and the Pacific Agreement 
have served to some extent as palhatives. 

"(4) Since the school-children's question arose 
in California, however, America has openly pro- 
jected various anti- Japanese plans. 

" (5) When subsequently the Cahfornian Leg- 
islature proposed to undermine the foundations 
of Japanese development in California by enact- 
ing a new land law, the Japanese could but rise 
in indignation, and at that time Japanese-Amer- 
ican diplomacy assumed a profound significance. 
The spirit of friendship toward America, how- 
ever, kept the Japanese from making up their 



248 A JAPANESE POINT OF VIEW 

minds to take drastic action. While the issue was 
left undecided, California actually attained her 
object, though the question was nominally left 
pending. The Americans are elated, but every 
Japanese is indignant at a procedure which ig- 
nored the Constitutions of California and of the 
United States, set at naught treaty obligations 
and trampled under foot the laws of humanity. 

"America took further steps to oppress Japan. 
America has tried (6) to alienate China from 
Japan in connection with the question of China's 
participation in the European war; (7) to oust 
Japan from investments- in China and to obtain 
capitalistic control of China; (8) to harass Ja- 
pan at the Peace Conference, to prevent Japan 
from possessing the former German islands in 
the South Pacific by proposing mandatory rule 
and to violate the Sino-Japanese Agreement and 
Japan's understanding with Great Britain and 
France regarding the disposal of Shantung; (9) 
to restrain Japan's movements with regard to the 
despatch of troops to Siberia or to estrange 
the relations between Japan and Russia; (10) 
to threaten Japan by greatly increasing the 
strength of the Pacific squadron; and (11) to 
assist the independence agitation in Korea, and 
(12) the anti-Japanese boycott in China; (13) 
America has abused and insulted Japan in the 



A JAPANESE POINT OF VIEW 249 

course of debate on the Peace Treaty with Ger- 
many; (14) with regard to the International 
Labor Conference, Mr. Sherman made remarks 
exceedingly insulting to Japan: it seems as if 
America desires to arouse Japan's indignation 
in order to make war; (15) in the meantime a 
new immigration bill has often been proposed in 
the Federal Legislature for anti-Japanese pur- 
poses, while (16) the anti-Japanese Cahfornians 
are striving fundamentally to exclude Japanese." 

The Osaka MainicM next describes the re- 
cent measures proposed in California, and then 
continues : 

"The anti-Japanese campaign of America is 
not confined to California or to the Kepub- 
licans and Progressivists alone ; it seems that the 
movement is supported throughout the country 
and even by the Democrats. It is no wonder 
that some Senator who opposed the Shantung 
amendment said, in explaining his reason for the 
opposition, that Japan's development in Shan- 
tung was preferable to that in America. 

"We must be indignant at the attitude of the 
Americans in antagonizing us and treating us as 
barbarians. Their actions are at variance with 
the Japanese - American Treaty of Commerce 
and Navigation, and contrary to the spirit of the 
League of Nations. They apparently intend to 



250 A JAPANESE POINT OF VIEW 

subject us to discriminative and insulting treat- 
ment, placing us below the inferior peoples of 
South Europe and the negroes. For this pur- 
pose the Americans apparently do not hesitate to 
destroy the principle of justice and humanity and 
to violate the code of amity and friendship. The 
question at stake is not solely the undermining of 
the Japanese interests fostered by many years of 
labor in America. How are the Japanese in 
America going to save the situation? How will 
the Japanese Government have America reflect 
on her doings and desist from doing injustice? 

"The situation is' taking a serious turn. If the 
limits of the moderation, self-control and patience 
of the Japanese are reached, it may lead to ir- 
revocable consequences. The Americans do well 
to remember the Japanese saying: 'The cornered 
mouse bites the cat' ; especially because America 
is not to Japan what a cat is to a mouse driven 
to a corner from which there is no escape ; rather 
the relations of the two countries resemble those 
of two tigers face to face with each other. More- 
over, the fault is the injustice of America. The 
only way to avoid a possible calamity is for 
America to reflect on her doings and rectify 
her attitude." 

This clipping was shown to several Japanese 
individuals of different types, and though all 



A JAPANESE POINT OF VIEW 251 

politely deprecated the publication of such an 
article, each agreed with at least one and gener- 
ally several of the counts in the sweeping indict- 
ment. Every American reader will realize that 
not all these counts are true, but the point is that 
many or most of them are believed to-day by 
Japanese readers, who are encouraged so to think 
by many newspapers, not only of the "yellow 
press" variety, but also by serious 'ones with large 
followings, like the Mainichi. Of course, many 
of these articles are privately fathered by mili- 
tary politicians, seeking to stir up pubhc feeling 
so that their Parliament will pass large army and 
navy appropriations, just as the Kaiser used to 
"rattle the sabre" when desirous of increasing his 
army or navy. Furthermore, Japanese milita- 
rists must feel that they are beginning to lose 
ground with the people, prosperous and generally 
desirous that prosperity continue uninterrupted. 
As the Irishman remarked of the man in the 
treadmill, the militarists are running as fast as 
they can to keep from going backward ! By thus 
stirring, up feeling against foreigners, they hope 
to convince readers that increasing the strength 
of an army and navy is a necessity and not a 
luxury. 

But even after taking these facts into con- 
sideration and making due allowance therefor,, 



252 A JAPANESE POINT OF VIEW 

there remains one great fact underlying all 
the others — the widespread irritation in Japan 
against our attitude toward them, as they inter- 
pret it. 

Unfortunately, they are looking at us from a 
distance through a telescope whose nearest lens 
is obscured by the words "California Legisla- 
ture." They live in a closely knit empire where 
no local legislatures can embarrass the policies 
of the Foreign Office at Tokyo. They cannot 
grasp om* system of sovereign states, any more 
than can certain of our state legislatures, impa- 
tient of national moves (or delaj^s) originating 
in Washington. Our system suits our people 
fairly well or they would change it, and although 
it sometimes handicaps our State Department, 
handicaps don't necessarily defeat a good runner. 
The reading of this Mairuchi article tempts 
one to answer it, section by section, and the 
reader is advised to yield to this temptation. The 
more that thinking Americans consider other 
folk's thoughts about our policies, and seek an- 
swers to their criticisms of us, the sooner will we 
have a large body of citizens qualified to lead 
public opinion in demanding sensible foreign 
policies. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE FIVE STRIPES OF CHINA^S FLAG 

The flag of the Chinese Repubhc consists of 
five horizontal stripes, red, yellow, blue, white 
and black. Among the Chinese and Japanese 
these five hues are considered to comprise all the 
colors of the rainbow, for in the one which the 
Chinese call "ching" is included blue, green, 
purple, and all their shades. The so - called 
"five-colored" porcelain of ancient China, thus 
interpreted, therefore, means that the artist used 
all his palette in its coloring. These five stripes 
on the Chinese flag represent its different peo- 
ples, the red one standing for those of the origi- 
nal eighteen provinces of China, the yellow for 
the Manchus, the blue (or, more properly, the 
"ching") for the Mongolians, the white for the 
Thibetans, and the black for folk of Chinese 
Turkestan. 

In substituting this new national emblem for 
the old flag of the Chinese Empire which dis- 
played a great dragon with hungry jaws, the 
Chinese Repubhc seems to an onlooker unwit- 

253 



254. CHINA'S FLAG 

tingly to admit that the days of the swallowing 
dragon are over, and have been succeeded by a 
division of their land into strips, symbolizing the 
swallowing by five foreign powers, England, 
France, Russia, Germany and Japan. The new 
banner reminds us that the time is past for 
academic discussion of the future partitioning 
of China — it is already broken up either into 
"spheres of influence" or else into outright parti- 
tions. If anyone questions this, will he kindly 
point out any considerable block of Chinese terri- 
tory which has not already been seized by out- 
siders, or marked out as "a sphere of influence," 
or tabbed by some one Power with its tabu sign 
notifying all others to keep their hands off I 
Where is there a province of China without a 
foreign garrison, or which she could alienate to 
any foreign power without promptly eliciting a 
protest from one or more of the other interna- 
tional bandits? The United States, alone of all 
the great Powers, has not taken a hand in 
slicing up the Chinese cake. We have grabbed 
no piece of broken China. We alone have torn 
no strip off the Chinese flag. The real slicing 
of the cake began way back in 1842, when, after 
winning a comic opera war against China, Eng- 
land seized Hongkong (now her great naval 
base in the Far East) forced the opening of 



CHINA'S FLAG 255 

five Chinese ports, obtained the right to trade 
generally, and to establish Consulates. Kight 
here, at the beginning of the game of grab, the 
United States Government put itself on record 
by ofiicially announcing to the Chinese Govern- 
ment through Caleb Cushing that "we do not 
desire any portion of the territory of China, 
nor any terms or conditions whatever which 
shall be otherwise than just and honorable to 
China as well as to the United States." And 
to this proposition we have consistently and 
honestly adhered. And yet how many Ameri- 
cans know that all through the war we kept 
a whole regiment (the 15th Infantry) at Tien- 
tsin, and that it is there to-day? In 1845 the 
British took Shanghai and also Kowloon, across 
the harbor from Hongkong. In 1858 to 1860 
Russia set the fashion for large scale plun- 
dering by helping herself to all the land north of 
the Amur and east of the Ussiiri rivers, a million 
square miles with six hundred miles of coast 
line. In 1885 and 1886, France, after brief and 
inglorious hostilities, took her great Tonkin terri- 
tory in the south. The wars by which England 
obtained Hongkong and France Tonkin remind 
one of the story of the bruised and bleeding 
darky who when lifted out of the ambulance 
upon arrival at the hospital was asked if he had 



256 CHINA'S FLAG 

been in a fight. "No, sah," replied he, "I'se been 
attending a massacre!" These two wars were 
very little ones, with even less glory; the loot, 
however, was excellent. In 1890, after General 
Graham's army had invaded and subdued Thibet, 
that portion of ancient China yielded herself by 
treaty to England's advance, which was broad- 
ened and confirmed by their trade treaty of 
1898. 

The really exhilarating scramble for Chinese 
territory took place from 1895 to 1898. In 
the former year France, by treaties with China 
(and Siam in 1883) extended her former hold- 
ings in those parts by a territory half again 
as large as France herself, with a population of 
22,000,000. She now rules a total of 80,000,000 
Chinese. In that same year Japan, after a short 
war with China, in which her losses were negli- 
gible, demanded Formosa, the Pescadores islands 
and the great Liao-Tung peninsula of South 
Manchuria. It was just at this point that an 
element of humor crept into the tragedy of 
China's spoliation. Learning of Japan's de- 
mands, Russia, Germany and France united in 
a joint note to Japan declaring that it would 
menace international peace if Japan received her 
South Manchurian demands. Of course, Japan 
had to submit, only to see Wei-hai-wei taken by 



CHINA'S FLAG 257 

England, and a little later what she had asked 
in South Manchuria (and more too!) by Russia, 
but oddly enough, without injury to the same 
international peace concerning which the Euro- 
pean Powers had been so solicitous. Amusing, 
wasn't it! — but what about Japan's point of 
view? — it was not long before Russia was to be 
rudely enlightened thereon! But before discuss- 
ing Japan's unexpected jolt to Russia let us get 
on with the tearing of China into strips. In 1896 
France and England made notable advances in 
the southern provinces of Yunnan and Szechuen 
respectively. 1897 and 1898 were banner years 
for European looters, for it was during the 
former that England got more land on the north 
Burma frontier^ France (in March) served her 
"non-alienation" or "hands off" notice regarding 
the large island province of Hainan, while in 
November, thanks to the murder of two German 
missionaries in Shantung, Germany obtained her 
excuse for seizing Kiaochao Bay together with 
much hinterland, since become famous under its 
province name of Shantung. (The Japanese 
believe that Shantung was Germany's pay for 
her part in forcing Japan's retrocession of the 
Liao-Tung peninsula!) Whereupon Russia, "in 
compensation for" what Germany had just 
obtained, demanded Port Arthur! That phrase 



258 CHINA'S FLAG 

"in compensation for" is really delightfully 
comic, if you only stop to think of it. One 
thief steals your purse, so another thief clearly 
has the right, "in compensation for" what the 
other has stolen, to receive your watch ! Really, 
there is a great deal of innocent amusement to 
be derived from watching the moves in the stran- 
gulation of China, assuming, of course, that 
the observer be not Chinese! February 11th, 
1898, England served a "non-alienation to other 
powers" notice regarding the entire valley of 
the Yangtse Kiang river — the heart of China 
and commercially its most valuable section. On 
April 10, 1898 (the day after Germany seized 
Kiaochao), France claimed and took the whole 
Bay of Kwang-chow upon the same terms as 
Germany got Kiaochao, and furthermore she 
followed England's lead by serving one of the 
all-too-familiar "non-alienation to other powers" 
notices concerning all Chinese territory lying 
south of that covered by England's similar notice 
of February 11th blanketing the Yangtse Val- 
ley, and especially protecting the provinces just 
north of her Tonkin. April 26th, Japan did the 
same regarding the province of Fulden, because, 
forsooth ! it was that part of the mainland which 
fronted her island of Formosa, 90 miles away 
across the sea. Observe, please, that there is 



CHINA'S FLAG 259 

honor among thieves. Next the "in compensa- 
tion for" joke was sprung once more, of course, 
with the usual success, when England, "in com- 
pensation for" Russia's "lease" (another humor- 
ous touch) of Port Arthur insisted upon having 
her "lease" of Wei-hei-wai extended so as to be 
coterminous with that of the Russians across the 
way at Port Arthur. And now for the only 
surprise in the whole entertainment, the one and 
only grab that did not succeed, — Italy demanded 
Sanmen Bay on the Chekiang Coast, and was 
refused! It seems incredible that Italy should 
not be allowed to thrust her hand into the inter- 
national grab-bag, but evidently, whilst five 
(England, France, Russia, Germany and Ja- 
pan) "was company, six was* a crowd," to para- 
phrase the old saying. The Portuguese colony 
of Macao known only for fantan gambhng and 
opium manufacture is too unimportant for inclu- 
sion in this more illustrious syndicate. In pass- 
ing, it is interesting to note that all this 1898 
grabbing went on while the United States was 
occupied with the Spanish war! 1900 will long 
be remembered as the year of the Boxer outbreak 
in China, the march of the six allied military 
commands to the relief of their Legations in 
Peking, the three hundred million tael indemnity 
demanded by the alhed powers, the definite oc- 



260 CHINA'S FLAG 

cupation of South Manchuria by the Russians, 
and the then meaningless punitive devastations 
of the German troops under definite orders from 
the Kaiser to revive and recall the savagery of 
their ancestors the Huns. Little did the world 
then understand the true modern meaning of the 
word Hun, now deeply graven on the tomb- 
stone of Germany's hopes! We Americans may 
properly take pride in recalling that we alone 
returned to China our share of the indemnity 
paid us ($20,000,000). In 1905, as a result of 
Japan's notable victory over Russia, she replaced 
that power in South Manchuria, and subse- 
quently in her claims over Eastern Inner Mon- 
goha. The mills of the gods ground slowly, but 
thus after ten years' wait Japan had her revenge 
for Russia's interference in her spoils of the 
1895 victory over China. During all the fifteen 
years following 1895 Japan, always competing 
with Russia, had been tightening her hold upon 
Korea, until at last, August 29, 1910, she cast 
off all diplomatic paraphrase and camouflage, 
deposed the Korean emperor and formally an- 
nexed his country. November 3, 1912, after 
Outer Mongolia had revolted from Chinese sov- 
ereignty, the revolt was formally approved by 
Russia (who doubtless in no wise encouraged or 
assisted therein I) but this document was nothing 



CHINA'S FLAG 261 

more or less than a declaration of that province 
passing into a Russian "sphere of influence," 
which China, by her treaty with Russia of No- 
vember 5, 1913, duly recognized. August 15th, 
1914, Japan delivered her ultimatum to Ger- 
many to surrender to her before September 15th, 
all her Shantung holdings "with a view to the 
eventual restoration of the same to China." The 
date of that eventuality has not yet been set. 
January 18, 1915, Japan presented her 21 de- 
mands upon China, which, after fruitless remon- 
strance, were accepted May 8th, but with formal 
announcement by China that it was done under 
duress. This unwise move of Japan's is now 
condemned by many intelligent Japanese, among 
others K. K. Kawakami, their able protagonist, 
who resides in San Francisco, and publishes his 
writings in English. 

There are other chapters in this grim despoil- 
ing of China, but the foregoing is tragedy 
enough for the average fair-minded onlooker. 
Taken altogether, it affords a strange picture of 
the systematic dismemberment of a great Orien- 
tal people as taught by four Christian nations of 
Europe, and learned by one Oriental pupil, copy- 
ing its Occidental teachers before it be too late 
and white races occupy too much nearby terri- 
tory, thereby endangering her seclusive safety. 



262 CHINA'S FLAG 

The last act in the drama was the reduction of 
the five spoliators of China to four, by the sub- 
stitution of Japan for Germany in Shantung. 
What will be the final outcome? Will the 
spoHators drop out one by one as Germany did, 
leaving in turn their spohations to the survivors? 
This breaking-up of China was materially 
aided by the marked differences existing between 
the types of Chinese inhabiting the various prov- 
inces. Then, too, the lamentable lack of roads 
or any other form of intercommunication except 
waterways facilitated piecemeal spoliation. Even 
close to so great a centre as Canton, the only 
roads are footpaths running along the top of 
dikes separating the paddy fields. Although in 
some other sections rude carts are possible, the 
narrowness of the average road has caused large 
wheelbarrows (sometimes assisted by a sail) gen- 
erally to supersede the cart. Up in the north, 
in the loess geological formation (provinces of 
Chihli, Shantung, Honan, Shansi and Shensi), 
the earth is so friable that the narrow roads are 
worn down further and further into the earth. 
In Shantung some of them are seventy feet be- 
low the surface of the ground ; the effect of rain 
on such a road can be easily imagined — it cer- 
tainly does not encourage travel even between 
neighboring villages. All this meant the gradual 



CHINA'S FLAG 263 

development of widely' differing customs and 
habits, as well as contrasting philosophies and 
psychologies. - Within the confines of greater 
China may be found as marked racial and 
thought differentiations as those differentiating 
all the European countries from the North Sea 
and the Baltic down to the Mediterranean. In 
this sense one may consider the Gulf of Chihli 
or the ever-shifting Hoang-ho or Yellow River 
as China's Baltic, and the Yangtse Valley or the 
West River still farther south, as her Mediter- 
ranean. Even to-day, when the different sections 
of China are being connected by modern im- 
provements in communications, South Chinamen 
differ from the northerners as greatly as do the 
Latin races of South Europe from its Teutonic 
peoples. Even far back in history these marked 
divergencies existed. Five centuries before the 
Christian era the idealism of the great Chinese 
sage Laotse differed widely from the prosaic 
ethics later known as Confucianism, which came 
out of Shantung in the north. The followers of 
the great northerner, Confucius, learned from his 
writings a benevolent communism, which con- 
trasts sharply with the individualism so highly 
prized in South China. In art the south shows 
marked differences from the north. As early as 
the third century, A. D., painting flourished much 



264j CHINA'S FLAG 

more in the south than in the north, where sculp- 
ture and architecture were more highly esteemeld 
and therefore developed. In view of these and 
other dissimilarities, it is remarkable that such 
differing peoples as the Chinese of the various 
provinces could so long have held together, and 
inertia is perhaps the best explanation therefor. 
ISTevertheless, these differences were all the time 
militating against any united resistance to the 
gradual breaking-up which land-grabbing by 
foreigners was accomplishing. 

As affording a proof of Chinese national spirit, 
much has lately been said and written of China's 
boycott of Japanese goods, a movement in which 
Chinese college and high school students are 
especially active. Trade statistics indicate that 
it has proved much more effective in South China 
than in the central and northern sections. Dur- 
ing October, 1919, Japanese exports to South 
China fell to 87,000 j^en from the 1918 total 
(same month) of 611,000 yen. The Chinese 
newspapers naturally attempt to show that the 
boycott has seriously affected Japanese trade, 
but the Osaka Asahi points out that according 
to the monthly trade returns of the Finance 
Department, Japan's exports to China between 
January and August, 1919, increased by 191,- 
000,000 yen over the same period of 1918, thus 



CHINA'S FLAG 265 

averaging an increase of 23,900,000 per month. 
Other official statistics, made up in American 
money, report that the first ten days of August, 
1919, show imports from China to Japan of 
$3,886,500 as compared with $2,293,500 for the 
same period in 1918, while Japanese exports to 
China for those same ten days in 1918 were $3,- 
450,500, as against $4,504,500 in 1919, divided 
as follows: to Central China, $2,078,500; to 
North China, $1,480,500 ; to Manchuria, $904,500 
and to South China only $41,000. This shows 
that the boycott works in the south, but in the 
north, even though the people are nearer to 
distrusted Japan, it seems to have little effect 
in restricting Japanese trade expansion. The 
traveller in China sees and hears a great deal 
about the boycott, for the students are constantly 
parading the streets with music and banners, 
shouting imprecations against merchants sus- 
pected of selling Japanese goods. One large 
seven-story department store in Canton was so 
effectively boycotted that we saw almost no pur- 
chasers in it, and yet unprejudiced Americans 
living in the city said the boycott was entirely un- 
just, and that it had been "engineered" by rival 
merchants. After seeing a number of these 
parades, one rather gets the feeling that the whole 
movement is but a pettish outburst against a 



266 CHINA'S FLAG 

stronger race by one whose childish behavior con- 
fesses its helplessness to employ more manly 
methods of national protest. 

Some European writers contend that the 
Chinese are not capable of governing them- 
selves? Is this true? Are the Chinese them- 
selves qualified to develop good government? 
What answer to this question does one get from 
their history or from a visit to their country? 
llie student of Chinese self-government finds 
unrolled before his eyes one long monotonous 
scroll recording misgovernment badly adminis- 
tered. Dishonesty at the top and dishonesty all 
the way down to the smallest official, plus an 
amazing inefficiency. During the days of the 
monarchy many foreign friends of China sighed 
for a republic, because the imperial officials were 
so notoriously inept and crooked. "Squeeze" 
prevailed everywhere, and an official position was 
valued according to the opportunity it gave for 
getting money "on the side." But all this un- 
savory state of affairs was going to be changed 
if and when a republic was set up. The mon- 
archy fell, a republic was proclaimed, and the 
new day dawned! And what has the daylight 
of that new day revealed? — graft everywhere, 
just as before,— nothing changed but the identity 
of the grafters. The spht between the north and 



CHINA'S FLAGf 26T 

gouth of China exists and continues "because of 
the ample opportunities it affords for graft. 
The matter of soldiers' pay necessitated by the 
strained relations between the two sections is 
worth considering. There are said to be 87,000 
troops quartered in Canton alone. Of course, 
they are perfectly useless there, and a four days' 
observation of their appearance confirms one's 
conclusions in that regard, for in no other land 
could one see such an agglomeration of weedy 
old men and boys, — "all sorts and conditions of 
men." But they are soldiers, which means sol- 
diers' pay, which in turn means that somebody 
is making a nice profit on each and every one of 
them, so the more employed the more profit; — ^it 
is a wonder there are not more than 87,000 of 
them! One of their Major Generals is a com- 
prador in a local bank, and our guide (who, when 
not guiding, runs a photograph shop, and is also 
manager of a plumbing establishment) employed 
his leisure hours as drill master with the rank of 
Major! 

Times have changed Httle (and the people 
not at all!) since Lord Charles Beresford wrote 
in 1899 ("The Break Up of China"): "As 
the generals, like all authorities in China, only 
have a nominal salary, they make large profits 
or squeezes during their commands. In order 



268 CHINA'S FLAG 

to report an instance, I questioned one of those 
in command when in Peking. He informed 
me that he commanded 10,000 men. I ascer- 
tained that all he actually commanded was 800. 
His method is common to China. He receives 
the money to pay and feed and clothe 10,000 
men. If this army was to be inspected, he hires 
coolies at 200 cash (5/^d.) a day to appear on 
parade. This is well known to the inspecting 
officer, but he receives a douceur to report that 
he has inspected the army and has found it in 
perfect order." "With the exception of Yuan 
Shi Kai's army, all the armies above referred to 
(14) have little or no firing practice, and none 
of them have any organization whatever for 
transport. It seems incredible, but some of the 
soldiers are still practised in shooting with bows 
and arrow^s at a target. ^Vhen at Peking I saw 
them practising in an open space near the Ob- 
servatory. Hitting the target is a detail of minor 
importance; the real merit consists in the posi- 
tion or attitude of the bowman when discharging 
his shaft." "The Consul at Wuchow told me 
that during the late riots soldiers were armed 
with every sort of weapon — guns, rifles and 
blunderbusses. They also carried long brass 
horns and gongs and other instruments to make 
discordant noises. They patrolled the streets and 



CHINA'S FLAG 269 

the outside of the town. Many were totally un- 
armed, and carried only a bird-cage and a fan, 
being known as soldiers by their military badge." 
At Canton one gets an insight into the present 
status of Chinese naval affairs. The West Kiver, 
in its reaches above Canton, is infested with 
pirates, and even the boats plying downstream 
to Hongkong (a seven hours' trip) have their 
decks patrolled by guards carrying rifles. Any 
decently efficient or self-respecting naval force 
would promptly have wiped out this anach- 
ronistic discredit to order and good govern- 
ment, but how do the Chinese treat the situation? 
Lying in the river, just off the Bund of Canton 
and convenient to the long rows of so-called 
"Flower Boats" (dives of every sort) are a num- 
ber of river gunboats flying the Chinese naval 
flag. As a military force they deserve the name 
of "junk" even more than any of that craft 
floating by them, but even so they could stop 
this anachronistic river-piracy if they wished. 
Instead, they lie comfortably anchored alongside 
Canton. A few miles down the river at Wham- 
poa (once a favorite anchorage for the famous 
American chpper ships) he, and for two years 
have laid, three fine Chinese battle cruisers, sent 
down from the north to overawe this leading city 
of the south, the largest in population of any in 



270 CHINA'S FLAG 

China. Naval pay goes on and the boats fly the 
Chinese flag, so that is all that is necessary. Is 
it any wonder that the Japanese won their 1895 
war against China in jig-time and with small 
losses? 

So much for China's possibilities in the manly 
art of self-defense, and now what about that 
fundamental pre-requisite for self-government — 
decency and honesty of the individual citizen? 
Some one has said that a nation gets a govern- 
ment it deserves, but no better. The filth of the 
average Chinaman is incredible. After one has 
walked through several of their villages, where 
dirty houses are thronged with unkempt children, 
dirty pigs and unwashed adults, or has visited 
a couple of those huddled up, never cleansed 
rabbit-warrens they call cities, he sighs for the 
neat and tidy houses of Japan, the land where 
even the poor coolie has his hot bath every day. 
How can decency get a fair start in a Chinese 
village or overcrowded city? Turning to the 
question of individual honesty, a traveller in 
China hears more about thieving, and reads more 
about it in the papers than anywhere else in the 
world. One's effects must always be kept locked 
up, in striking contrast to Japan, where hotel 
rooms may be safely left unlocked without fear 
of loss. Even in Hongkong, admirably gov- 



CHINA'S FLAG 271 

erned and policed by the British as it is, shops 
are constantly being broken into by the Chinese, 
hats are snatched from passengers in jinrickshas, 
and counterfeit money, so common in China, is 
constantly passed on foreigners. I never saw 
any counterfeit money in Japan, but was caught 
twice within an hour after landing in China, and 
frequently thereafter. The Hongkong Post of 
December 18, 1919, summed up in a masterly 
editorial a general indictment against the Chinese 
for robbery, motor-car hold-ups, murder of gaol- 
keepers, etc. Villages are compactly built with 
no straggling houses, for fear of the numerous 
robbers constantly abroad in the land. Nor is 
thieving confined to the innumerable and omni- 
present poor, for whom necessity might provide 
an excuse. The month before we visited Can- 
ton, the comprador of a local bank, who draws 
a modest salary, entertained at dinner over 4,000 
guests! Of course, he didn't steal, he only 
"squeezed"! And yet many pro-Chinese Ameri- 
can writers continue to say that Japanese banks 
employ Chinese compradors because they are so 
honest! This brings us to the crux of the busi- 
ness and political problem in China, — public 
opinion expects everybody in power to "squeeze", 
and nobody objects to it, for each hopes to be 
able later to take a hand in the game, even if not 



272 CHINA'S FLAG 

already engaged therein. Of course, there are 
honest Chinamen, many of them, but public 
opinion countenances the "squeeze" system, and 
upon such a public opinion good government 
cannot be built. Foreign traders in Manchuria 
allege that this system of demanding "squeeze" 
by the Chinese officials is being employed by 
the Japanese to keep shut "the Open Door." 
They say that agents of the great Mitsui bank- 
ing concern of Tokyo so meet this "squeeze" re- 
quirement in self-defense that Japanese business 
men, clients of this bank, are not delayed or 
mulcted as are foreigners not so equipped. 

Perhaps the worst curse of China to-day is its 
craze for gambling. Everybody does it, and the 
consequence is that many who have means be- 
come beggared, and the poor stay poor. Some 
of that hard working class, the chair-porters of 
Canton and Hongkong, make as high as twenty 
dollars per month, which is much for such frugal- 
living folk, but it all goes into the gambhng 
houses. And how is the new republic meeting 
this national evil that saps the nation's honesty 
even more than its wealth? For a while it was 
shut down, but about two years ago the gamblers 
were allowed to recommence operations, so that 
in cities like Canton gambling is now wide open. 
And who controlled the political situation in that 



CHINA'S FLAG 273 

city when so vicious a revival of gambling was 
permitted — some survivor of the old imperial 
regime? Not at all; no less a progressive re- 
former than Dr. Sun Yat Sen, a prominent fac- 
tor in establishing the republic. 

When the Republic first came in, a determined 
stand was taken against the opium traffic, but 
laxity and worse by officials of the Repubhc has 
permitted a decided recrudescence in the trade, 
especially in the provinces of Shensi, Kiangsu 
(whose capital is jSTanking) and Kwei-chow. It 
was not for nothing that the Chinese have long 
had their customs service under the financial 
supervision of a Britisher. The fair-minded 
traveller, even after a short stay in the Celestial 
Republic, can hardly reach any other conclusion 
than that government of the Chinese by the 
Chinese will always produce the same results it 
has produced in the past and is to-day producing, 
— inefficient government of the squeezed by the 
squeezers — that the futme of China will be what 
the future of China always has been — only a lit- 
tle more of its present ! 

Lest the shortness of my stay in China made 
too hasty my conclusions as to Chinese character 
let them be checked up against public statements 
by Dr. Charles K. Edmunds, for sixteen years 
a teacher in that country, and by Dr. George E. 



274. CHINA'S FLAG 

Vincent, President of the Rockefeller Founda- 
tion, who spent the summer of 1919 travelling 
all over the country from Mukden to Canton 
and from Shanghai to Changsha on behalf of 
the magnificent medical benefactions which Mr. 
Rockefeller's millions are there bestowing. Both 
Dr. Edmunds and Dr. Vincent are well known 
leaders of scientific thought and men of un- 
usually clear vision, and both are enthusiastic as 
to China's future. But what do they say of its 
present? In Dr. Edmunds' "33,000 Miles in 
China" we find an amazing series of episodes 
showing the laiavery and especially the thievery 
to which the traveller is exposed in a country of 
pre-medieval civilization and lack of communi- 
cations. Says Dr. Vincent in a recently pub- 
lished article, "Chinese Progress in Medicine, 
Schools and Politics": "It must be owned that 
there are disconcerting features in present-day 
Chinese life. 'The Chinese lavishes so much 
loyalty on family, community, and province that 
he has none left for the nation', says a clever 
returned student at dinner. 'The country is 
practically sold out now; no wonder the Peking 
politicians are getting what they can,' declares 
another. 'Oh, we always absorb any invaders in 
the course of two or three centuries' is the 
philosophic dictum of a serene spectator of his 



CHINA'S FLAG 275 

country's danger. In a company of intelligent, 
foreign-trained young Chinese, some of them 
minor Government officials, questions about the 
composition of the present legislative bodies, the 
qualifications of the electors, the number partici- 
pating in the voting and the like, elicit amused 
replies or merely provoke gently ironic laughter. 
Certain things in China may well cause appre- 
hension: the division between North and South, 
which are terms of political faith rather than of 
geography; large armies unpaid for months, 
living on the countryside and terrorizing towns 
and cities; bandits now and then committing 
depredations within a few miles of centres like 
Peking and Canton; a government vacillating 
between the demands of militarists and fear of 
popular uprisings; revenues needed for con- 
structive national tasks diverted to the uses of 
clamorous generals or dissipated in administra- 
tion inefficient or worse; the development of 
natural resources hindered by the lack of public 
order and security; internal discord and weak- 
ness inviting aggression from without." 

He points out that "there are nearly two hun- 
dred and fifty hospitals almost exclusively for 
Chinese patients established and maintained by 
Protestant missionaries . . . various Catholic 
orders offer hospital service, generally in the 



276 CHINA'S FLAG 

larger centres." Where would hygiene In China 
be if these foreign-maintained institutions were 
suppressed and only the few Chinese-conducted 
ones left? The situation would be even more 
appalling than it is now. One of the most im- 
portant temples in the largest city in China 
(Canton) is devoted to the God of Medicine. It 
is thronged by devotees who upon a small pay- 
ment are allowed to draw lots and receive the 
prescription bearing the number they draw, and 
this prescription they have filled and take ! In a 
similar temple in Shanghai they paste a prayer 
on the portion of a sacred image which corre- 
sponds with the ache in the suppliant's anatomy. 
Please notice that these practices obtain in im- 
portant and improved centres of Chinese civili- 
zation and not merely in some obscure and 
untutored mountain village. Dr. Vincent speaks 
of young Chinese doctors being "trained in the 
United States, Europe and Japan. In the last 
named country medical education of an excellent 
character is given in the best schools, such as 
that of the Imperial University of Tokyo." He 
is quite right, and the education of every kind 
which China is to-day getting from foreigners 
(and without which she would receive almost 
none!) is everywhere in Japan provided by the 
Japanese themselves, and that too of the most 



CHINA'S FLAG ^77 

modern type. I attended over half a dozen lec- 
tures at the University of Kyoto, in Political 
Economy, Administrative Law, advanced use of 
the X-ray, etc., and was amazed at the high 
standard of education there displayed, and the 
deep interest and careful attention of the stu- 
dents. Never have I heard a more reasoned lec- 
ture on English Literature than one there given 
by Dr. Kuriagawa on Keats' "Nightingale." 
A comparison between the foreign-given educa- 
tion of China and the home-made variety in 
Japan shows all the difference between national 
ineptitude and its extreme reverse. 

Why should our country consider itself as 
especially called upon to act as protector of 
China against foreign aggression any more than 
of Egypt or Persia or the Balkans? And yet 
some of our statesmen would have us believe that 
it is our duty so to do, which means and will 
mean incessant friction with one or other of the 
five powers already possessing territory origi- 
nally Chinese. Ought not our foreign policy in 
this regard to be clarified and made to square 
with the stay-at-home-and-mind-your-own-busi- 
ness dictum of our justly venerated Monroe 
Doctrine? Is it logical to support that Doc- 
trine on the eastern side of the Pacific and 
infringe its principles on the western side? Bn'; 



278 CHINA'S FLAG 

isn't there possible some middle-of-the-road plan 
between the discouraging inefficiency and cor- 
ruption of a Chinese-run government and for- 
eigners' tearing-up of her land into as many 
strips as her flag has stripes? The great loans 
(Millard says four hundred million dollars) 
which Japanese bankers have recently poured 
into China with studied carelessness as to their 
useful application shows that Chinese corruption 
must be headed off at the source of the stream. 
Loans to such officials should only be made under 
supervision of their expenditure, preferably by 
an international control. In this way no one 
country or group will be tempted territorially 
to foreclose on mortgages obtained for money 
wasted or stolen by Chinese officials. How this 
can be worked out it is difficult to say, but the 
best plan yet advanced is the foreign loan con- 
sortium now under negotiation, which essentially 
is but the logical outcome of Secretary Knox's 
admirable suggestion for the neutrahzation of 
the Manchurian railways, which, if it served no 
other purpose, at least proved the non-existence 
of the much touted Open Door in China. Inter- 
national control of the Chinese customs works 
admirably, and there is no reason to fear that 
if such a system were extended, the extension 
would not function equally well. 



CHINA'S FLAG 279 

The whole Chinese problem has reached such 
an acute stage that it seems necessary either 
regretfully to admit that it is too late or imprac- 
ticable to save their sovereignty for the Chinese 
or else to show our prompt willingness to take a 
definite and decided stand in the matter. Amer- 
ica must "put up or shut up !" She must "put 
up" by contributing her share in money toward 
an international consortium which will so control 
all China's security for loans as to make impos- 
sible the control of any slice of her territorial 
sovereignty by an unscrupulous lender, be he an 
individual or a nation. Failing this willingness 
to "put up," America must "shut up," which is 
to say she must cease her "policy of pin-pricks," 
— of criticizing what Japan or any other power 
is doing to push its commercial or other interests 
in China. 

But whatever else we do or don't do, there is 
need for definite assurance by our government 
of backing to such of our business men as un- 
dertake proper ventures in China. Not long 
ago it was the fashion to abuse fair govern- 
ment support of its nationals abroad — the critics 
called it "dollar diplomacy" — but I for one earn- 
estly believe that the American business man 
deserves support from home when his American 
dollar is invested abroad. A while ago this was 



280 CHINA'S FLAG 

an academic question, but so great has grown our 
profit balance that now American capital must 
seek outlet abroad, and he who denies it proper 
protection is no true American. It was in just 
such a manly manner that the British Union 
Jack increased its prestige by protecting that of 
its commerce in foreign fields. Our progressive 
business men deserve as well of us as does the 
honest British trader of his own government, and 
it is a safe prediction that the American is going 
to get it. 

As for the famous and frequently discussed 
Open Door in China, what of it? It has never 
existed, does not to-day exist, and never will ex- 
ist except in such parts as are completely under 
the control of an international consortium. In- 
stead of an Open Door, China possesses a series 
of Side Doors, or "Family Entrances," difficult 
to enter save by merchants belonging to the com- 
mercial family of the foreign power dominating 
that district. Japan has such a side door into 
Manchuria, and it would be more profitable to 
American commerce to enjoy such a 50-50 ad- 
mission to that side-door as financial collabora- 
tion with Japanese would offer, than a really 
Open Door could afford. 

It is not too late to keep China's flag intact, 
but it can only be done by a definite international 



CHINA'S FLAG 281 

act, something similar to the foreign loan con- 
sortimn now under consideration. A sense of 
fairness to China demands that something be 
done, and done quickly, or it is too late, and 
China partitioned beyond remedy! 



CHAPTEK XII 

AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 

Aftee some months' study of the international 
balance around the Pacific Ocean the conviction 
becomes iiTesistible that the war's readjustments 
have been almost as radical there as in Europe. 
In no particular has this change of condition been 
evidenced more strikingly than by Australia's 
new position and influence within the British 
Empire, a change that is due chiefly to her splen- 
did part in the war, but also in some measure to 
the North Sea being cleared of the German 
Navy, and therefore no longer necessitating a 
protective concentration there of British naval 
forces. Australasia, and also Canada, will have 
vastly more weight than ever before in British 
Imperial Councils, especially in the disposition 
of their naval forces in the Pacific, but it will be 
Austraha that will both lead and have the final 
say upon its policy. A study of this new inter- 
national "outlook" is most interesting for the 
United States, if for no other reason because it 

282 



AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 283 

touches our relations with Japan, and an im- 
proved understanding between that Empire and 
our Kepublic is of the first importance not only 
for both of us but also for the peace of all the 
vast Pacific region. Besides, it is difiicult to 
avoid the conclusion that the Pacific question is 
the next great one to come before the nations. 
In 1852 that far-seeing Secretary of State, 
William H. Seward, said: "The Pacific Ocean, 
its shores, its islands, and the vast regions beyond 
will become the chief theatre of events in the 
world's great Hereafter." We sometimes forget 
that its mighty expanse covers one quarter of the 
whole globe, and that it contains one half of the 
globe's entire water surface — its problems are 
certainly no small ones. 

A better understanding of the significance of 
post-war Austraha and New Zealand will help 
us to find our way to more comfortable relations 
with the Japanese, for it will reveal how materi- 
ally the solution of the old Pacific problem has 
been advanced by the world war. It would be a 
grim revenge upon that arch disturber of inter- 
national peace, the Hun, if the hideous world 
calamity precipitated by his arrogant ambition 
can be shown to have effected an automatic elimi- 
nation of war-provoking possibilities around the 
Pacific. Fancy the Hun involuntarily assuring 



284 AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 

peace to the Pacific! — a most useful revenge in- 
deed for both Americans and Japanese ! 

One cannot travel extensively in those waters 
without becoming impressed by this striking 
change from pre-war to present conditions, and 
chiefly as exemplified by the new light in which 
Australia appears before the whole world, and 
especially should to us Americans. The resolute 
position maintained at Versailles by her Prime 
Minister, Hughes, typified the new Power which 
has arisen under the Southern Cross — a Power 
which, after demonstrating military efficiency to 
a surprising degree, knew definitely both what 
it needed, and what it must prevent, and set an 
example both to us and the Japanese of honest 
frankness and sturdy persistence. 

For the past five years America's eyes — ^men- 
tal as well as physical — have been turned east- 
ward so steadily as temporarily to lose sight of 
Pacific Ocean affairs. Now that the war has 
ended, leaving us honorably free again to con- 
sider our own interests, we are beginning to 
realize how materially the struggle in Europe 
has readjusted the international status around 
about that vast body of water. But how have 
these changes smoothed away certain dangerous 
tendencies which were there beginning to menace 
that peace for which we long, and for which we 



AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 285 

willingly fought with all our might? In the first 
place, Russia, as an ever-advancing and increas- 
ingly dangerous autocracy, has disappeared from 
the problem. As for Germany, what a change! 
In 1914 the Kaiser, still uncurbed, was absorbing 
South Sea Islands and exploiting their copra 
possibilities, preliminary to his next great move 
of swallowing Holland so as to acquire not only 
her North Sea harbors, but also her priceless 
East Indian islands with their 50,000,000 inhabi- 
tants and natural riches which, even under easy- 
going Dutch colonial methods, were yielding 
fortune after fortune. So much were the rest of 
us engage^d in discussing the Alsace-Lorraine 
question, the Balkan, and all those other dear 
old European problems (without which sundry 
magazine writers would have starved, and For- 
eign Office clerks of many capitals lost employ- 
ment!) that we had forgotten all about that great 
world prize, the Dutch islands of Java, Sumatra, 
etc., whose seizure Treitschke was openly advo- 
cating. But Australia hadn't! The change from 
the Kaiser in 1914 to his standing in 1919 
shows a transformation difficult for anyone but 
Napoleon Bonaparte to realize! 

To grasp how completely the World War 
has readjusted the Pacific Ocean problem, let 
us finish this review of its pre-war status. The 



286 AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 

great factors then, were, of course, the imperial 
governments of Russia, Germany, Japan and 
England, the royal one of Holland, and three 
republics, France, China and ourselves. In this 
connection, perhaps it is timely to remark that 
there are folk who plausibly maintain that Eng- 
land is more of a republic than is ours, possess- 
ing, as she does, far more checks on executive 
personal power, and a more promptly responsive 
form of representative govermnent. But the 
most important feature to be noticed in this pre- 
war picture is that of Australia's standing within 
the British Empire, at least as it seemed to 
friendly outsiders. Wasn't it fair to assume that 
when Australians refused to permit the landing 
of Hindoo citizens of British India, she caused 
concern in Downing Street, that centre from 
which pumps out and to which returns the em- 
pire's heart-blood that colors the Union Jack? 
Wasn't even more concern superinduced there 
by Australia's coolness toward the Anglo-Japa- 
nese alliance then so popular in London? Nor 
did Canada difPer in her embarrassing stand 
upon Japanese immigration from the views of 
Australia, which, by the way, agreed completely 
with those of our westernmost states. 

What I am trying to accentuate is that before 
the war many friendly outsiders could not help 



AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 287 

noting that the Japanese immigration policy of 
Australia and Canada, so Hke that of California, 
differed materially from the views of English- 
men in London dispassionately considering a 
distant theory, and not a next-door condition. 
What was going to result within the Empire 
from that pregnant difference of policy? Aus- 
tralia, then the jingo of the British household, 
was certainly causing worry to her steadier old 
world cousins at home who, honorably following 
British traditions of desiring peace throughout 
the earth were, therefore, responsible for a 
courteous consideration of the Japanese point of 
view. Australia, of course, was loyally British 
to the core, but upon certain questions of im- 
perial foreign policy it was clear that she had 
nothing like the complete approval and backing 
of the Empire that she commands to-day, thanks 
to her magnificent response to the homeland's 
need in the war, and also to the readjustment of 
matters international in her neighborhood. 

So much for Austraha and Canada before the 
war, and now for one other important detail 
to complete our pre-war picture. The United 
States then had an efficient navy, but our army 
was so small and so lacking in plans for expan- 
sion, that other nations disregarded it in their 
calculations. Furthermore, most other nations 



288 AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 

(including the Germans!) credited us with such 
lust for commercial gain as completely to write 
off our ability, even if urgent need arose, to raise 
a modern army, with all that means in numbers, 
technical training and equipment. Some even 
said we were too money-mad to fight. Thank 
God, our America of to-day is once more the 
America of our heroic forefathers ! 

To recapitulate, — before the war the Pacific 
Ocean was surrounded by four imperial govern- 
ments (Russia, Germany, Japan and England), 
one royal one (Holland) and three republics. 
China and the United States were generally con- 
sidered hopelessly and ansemically pacific, and 
Holland equally negligible as an international 
power. Australia and Western Canada were 
mere colonial outposts of the British Empire, 
both sidestepping the Empire's policy toward 
Hindoos and Japanese. So much for what 
used to be true, only a very few (but hideous!) 
years ago. Then came the war, focussing the 
brain power of the nations upon the Military 
Monster of Central Europe. 

But now, turning our eyes away from the 
bloody battlefields of Europe, and looking west- 
ward again across that vast stretch of water 
which, during a ghastly half decade, especially 
merited its name of Pacific, what do we see? — 



AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 289 

nothing more striking and significant than the 
sturdy Anglo-Saxon island power of the South 
Seas, at last come to its own ! 

Gone from the picture entirely is Germany, 
leaving behind her, in many a coral island form- 
erly an earthly paradise, the ugly stain of her 
brutal exploitation of the tractable aborigines. 
Do you know about the copra trade, something 
which touches the Australasian islands very 
closely? That brilliant writer of honest spirit, 
Charles Edward Kussell, has recently described 
in "After the Whirlwind" how Germany, realiz- 
ing the growing world need for vegetable fats, 
and also the hitherto undeveloped possibilities of 
the South Sea Islands for copra (the oil-produc- 
ing rind of the dried cocoanut), deliberately dra- 
gooned island labor by commanding her islanders 
to long terms at hard labor on trumped-up 
charges of infracting unknown German colonial 
laws. This colonial application of Deutchland 
Ueber Alles was already returning such hand- 
some dividends to Berlin as to ensure its rapid 
spread wherever the Prussian flag waved over 
those distant "places in the sun." Germany has 
gone from the Pacific, and many a poor slave of 
her colonial system joins in the general inter- 
national relief that her "government for the 
governors" has disappeared. Poor Russia, the 



290 AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 

victim of half-baked idealism, that far worse 
curse than autocratic mihtarism, is so engrossed 
in national suicide as to be removed for many a 
long day from serious international consideration 
on the Pacific. ISTot even the most advanced 
Japanese jingo can longer claim it necessary to 
increase or maintain naval or military estimates 
upon the patriotic ground of defense against a 
threatening Russia. 'No, so far as Japan is con- 
cerned, she need no longer anticipate any aggres- 
sion from either Russia or Germany, and need 
only fear jingoes at home who may urge aggres- 
sion on her own part. This is a time for every 
nation to put the soft pedal on its jingoes — the 
times are not opportune. As for China, is her 
position any more significant to-day than before 
the war? Frankly, the so-called Republic of 
China cuts no greater international figure now 
than did ever their Imperial Government before 
the war. 

The position of our sister republic, France, in 
the Far East, remains the same to-day that it 
was before the Germans broke loose in Europe. 
In Pacific matters we come into court with 
cleaner hands, because, while France took great 
territory from defenseless China, we never did 
and never will. We have seen that, as a result of 
the war, Japan has gained a number of Pacific 



AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 291 

islands formerly under the German flag, she 
having been made mandatory for all those north 
of the Equator. Many American friends of 
Japan are hopeful that wiser counsels will later 
prevail in Tokyo, and that this long step of 1,400 
miles eastward, open to so much evil misunder- 
standing, will be avoided by Japan's turning the 
current of her expansion northwesterly instead 
of southeasterly. Such an alteration would re- 
move misunderstanding here, and improve her 
relations with Australia. 

And what of AustraHa? 

This of her — that those who wish intelligently 
to know of the probable future of Pacific Ocean 
affairs will do well to study her and watch her 
development. Thus will they learn to look upon 
the Australian Continent and her sister islands, 
New Zealand, Tasmania, etc., much as Burke 
and other far-sighted Englishmen regarded the 
British colonies along the American seaboard 
at the time of the Revolution. The parallel 
between Australia of to-day and the American 
colonies in 1776 is striking. We are apt to think 
of her as distant from England and small in 
population. She is as near in days' travel to 
London as was our eastern seaboard in 1776. 
We were then three million people, less homo- 
geneous in race than are the five million British- 



292 AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 

ers that people Australia and her sister islands. 
All of those forefathers of ours were peculiarly 
men and women of initiative — if they had not 
been, they would have stayed quietly at home 
and not braved the terrors of the long Atlantic 
voyage and the invasion of the unknown wilder- 
ness. Initiative is to-day the outstanding char- 
acteristic of the Austrahans, and upon it they 
are laying the firm foundations of a great people. 
Every great nation shows a jealous desire to 
keep its blood pure, and this is markedly true of 
the British and of the Japanese alike. In no 
part of the British Empire is insistence upon 
racial purity more pronounced than in Aus- 
tralia, whose most popular and successful po- 
litical slogan is "White Australia!" Although 
this means exclusion of Asiatic immigration, 
and is, therefore, criticized by Japanese publi- 
cists, they cannot deny that they also exhibit a 
similar pride of race. The Chinese intermarry 
everywhere with any race, but the Japanese do 
so but seldom. This is very noticeable in South 
America, for wherever Chinese settle mixture 
of race ensues, but not so with the Japanese. 
The policy of our Anglo-Saxon cousins in the 
South Seas to preserve a "White Australia" af- 
fords reassuring proof that their great continent 
will remain a white stronghold, with a popula- 



AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 293 

tion undiluted by Eurasian offspring so common 
in other Far Eastern parts. 

So earnestly do I believe in the present and 
future greatness of Australia as to consider it an 
important factor in eliminating the one great 
stumbling-block to cordial friendship between 
our people and the Japanese — the illusion called 
the "Yellow Peril." And as an antidote to this 
illusion, what of Australia? Throughout Cali- 
fornia, Oregon and Washington, the Chambers 
of Commerce, those non-partisan aggregations 
of the best business minds of each community, 
are peculiarly public-spirited and efficiently ac- 
tive, even for American conmiercial bodies. I 
found those of Los Angeles, San Francisco and 
Portland particularly interested in building up 
direct trade with Australia. This opens the 
way to their realization of Austraha as a Yel- 
low Peril antidote. New ships were being de- 
voted to carrying the products of the Pacific 
slope direct to Sydney, Melbourne and other 
Australasian ports, and the local newspapers 
were constantly printing articles and editorials 
upon the increasing importance of those dis- 
tant markets. The growing interest in this 
trade along our western coast will inevitably 
produce a widely diffused knowledge there of the 
enhanced significance within the British Empire 



294 AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 

now enjoyed by post-war Australia. The sooner 
that knowledge comes to all those wide-awake 
western Americans described above, the sooner 
will they understand how like their own is the 
attitude toward the Asiatic races of our sturdy 
Anglo-Saxon friends of Austraha, that new 
front of the British Empire, and what that 
unanimity of policy means for all participants. 
This knowledge should as certainly relieve them 
from even subconscious dread of a Japanese in- 
vasion, as the collapse of Russia surely cancels 
the argument of Japanese jingoes for maintain- 
ing or increasing their military and naval scale 
of preparedness. 

The Japanese know well that the attitude of 
the great continent to the south of her is the same 
as that of our people upon Asiatic immigration. 
The shrewd Japanese also laiow far better than 
we that, since the war, the British Empire in all 
its vast strength stands solidly with the Aus- 
trahans, and that the continent of the Southern 
Cross is no longer regarded as merely a colonial 
outpost of the great Empire, but has become that 
Empire's Pacific front on the east, just as Can- 
ada is her front on the west. Japanese news- 
papers have rung with comment upon Admiral 
Jellicoe's epoch-marking recommendations that 
the great base of the British fleet be moved from 



AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 295 

the North Sea to Singapore, that important 
gateway to the Pacific. Much as English and 
Americans may criticize each other (for criti- 
cism is a favorite Anglo-Saxon family sport), 
no Japanese is so silly as to give an instant's 
credence to the idea that a Yellow Peril could 
be directed at either of the great English-speak- 
ing countries without immediately drawing the 
other one into its support. The admirable Bal- 
four spoke of the "Race Patriotism of the An- 
glo-Saxons," and there is no gainsaying it. The 
new war-won position of Australia and New 
Zealand in the British Empire completes the 
answer to the Yellow Peril illusion, and nowhere 
is this to-day better understood than in Japan. 

And what, in conclusion, of Australia? 

In 1867 Charles Wentworth Dilke predicted 
that "the relations of America and Australia 
will be the key to the future of the Pacific," and 
so I believe them to be. Our relations are of the 
best, and, thanks to the initiative of our west 
coast cities, are sure to grow better and better. 
Americans returning from France tell of Aus- 
tralian soldiers saluting American ofiicers in 
preference to all others, just out of sheer friend- 
liness and comprehension of the similarity be- 
tween our types of manhood and points of view. 
We may confidently look forward to the same 



296 AND WHAT OF AUSTRALIA? 

comfortable relations with the vigorous young 
Australasian people that characterizes our neigh- 
borliness with Canada, all of us speaking the 
same language and enjoying similar free in- 
stitutions. 

The more Australians, and also Canadians, 
grow and strengthen, the better for peace on the 
Pacific. Already, they, plus our new military 
preparedness, afford an antidote for Japanese 
aggression against us or any other Anglo-Sax- 
ons, and that in itself is a complete argument in 
favor of cordiality between us and the Land of 
the Rising Sun, which will definitely justify the 
name so long borne by the vast western ocean. 



CHAPTEK XIII 



SOME CONCLUSIONS 



The most important step toward the formula- 
tion of a foreign policy is a due consideration of 
the point of view entertained by the people with 
whom that policy will have to do. Even sup- 
posing that one's intentions are of the best, we 
must ascertain what the other fellow is going to 
think about them. This means that we should 
know him sufficiently well to understand his 
manner of thought. To that end we have con- 
sidered together in the foregoing pages observa- 
tions upon the life and customs of the Japanese 
so as to learn something from them of his thought 
processes, especially in those two fundamentals 
which in any nation command its finest minds — 
religion and aesthetics. We have also . pointed 
out the greatly increased importance of Aus- 
tralia within the British Empire, and what would 
seem to be the consequences, so far as we are 
concerned. Perhaps it may seem to the reader 
that too much space has been given to showing 
how the Japanese mind expresses itself in gar- 

297 



298 SOME CONCLUSIONS 

dens and religious pilgrimages and other ob- 
servances, but our excuse must be a desire to let 
Americans see how Japanese thought functions 
along two such intimate lines. After some com- 
prehension of the Japanese point of view upon 
those characteristic features of his civihzation, it 
becomes easier so to adjust our own thought as 
to make hopeful an attempt to harmonize our 
foreign policies toward the Far East with Ori- 
ental views and aspirations. It is idle to pretend 
that our points of view are even similar. Our 
own civilization, religion and individual training 
differ widely from those of Japan, and theirs 
has lasted many centuries longer than ours. 
Some things of which we strongly disapprove 
have been long inculcated in the training of their 
youth, and vice versa. If one is not prepared to 
investigate the great problems that are arising 
and will arise about the Pacific with an open 
mind upon matters social as well as national, he 
had best give up the study in advance, admit he 
is a small man, and remain quietly at home close 
to his village pump. Be prepared to balance 
national inequalities, or keep away from the 
Pacific. And, for veracity's sake! don't start 
out with any such exploded theory as that all 
men are born equal, for least of anywhere is this 
true across the western ocean. Nor does it mat- 



SOME CONCLUSIONS 299 

ter in the slightest how unequal are individuals 
or nations if only the observer is ready to balance 
their inequalities with the same whole-souled in- 
terest in their satisfactory combination that the 
Japanese show in their arrangement of flowers. 
An excellent relation existed between our peo- 
ple and the Japanese in 1905, one which perhaps 
benefited them materially more than it did us, 
but unfortunately a marked change has since 
then developed which has benefited neither in 
any way. Changes should be made in our re- 
spective foreign policies which will benefit both. 
Why not? When is discord more advantageous 
than harmony? It is my belief that the Japanese 
are now going more than half way to meet us. 
The admirable Gentlemen's Agreement, under- 
taken by the Japanese themselves when the in- 
comparable Elihu Root was our Secretary of 
State, checked an excessive incursion here of 
Japanese labor whose lower standard of living 
was producing such unfortunate friction with 
American labor. Recently, when an increasing 
influx of Japanese wives for their laborers 
residing here revived the unfortunate friction, 
again their Government, on its own initiative, 
provided a reasonable check by adding a Ladies' 
Agreement to the already existing Gentlemen's 
Agreement, and are withholding passports from 



300 SOME CONCLUSIONS 

these so-called "picture brides," just as they 
formerly arranged to do from their laboring 
men desirous of entering the higher-paid field of 
American labor. Those two acts showed good 
faith and good judgment, and we can safely do 
business with people possessing those two funda- 
mental traits of character. Certain Japanese 
newspapers have attacked their government for 
this Ladies' Agreement, but then, most unfor- 
tunately, newspapers of both our countries are 
nowadays constantly attacking the other's peo- 
ple and their good faith, and also anyone in their 
own country who prefers peace to bitterness. 
This hostility of the Yellow Press of both coun- 
tries toward any attempt to better our relations 
is what golfers would call "a rub of the green" 
or a "hazard" in the course which, although it 
cannot be ignored, should not be allowed un- 
duly to delay our progress. 

Our commerce would be greatly benefited by 
a better understanding with the Japanese, for it 
would thereby be aided to enter and develop 
Asian markets by cooperation from such nearby 
experts as the intelligent traders of the Island 
Kingdom. As fellow Orientals they know those 
markets' needs and limitations much better than 
distant Occidentals hke ourselves. Whether our 
statesmen (or even our politicians) are begin- 



SOME CONCLUSIONS 301 

ning to realize this or not, our business men cer- 
tainly are alive to its valuable possibilities, and 
unless those who should lead public thought get 
into step with this movement — already a large 
and steadily growing one — they risk losing their 
position as leaders in that profitable procession. 
And these forward-looking exporters of ours will 
before long exercise their influence as paying 
advertisers upon our newspapers so as to modify 
and ultimately to terminate their present un- 
profitable attacks upon everything Japanese. 
These newspapers are guessing wrong, and 
American newspapers know their business too 
well to guess wrong for long! 

^Every business man in our land knows the 
menace to honest enterprise which lies in the 
Bolshevik movement. He knows that it origi- 
nates in Russia, but that it must be combated 
here in order to protect the civilization we in- 
herited from our fathers. But does every Ameri- 
can business man realize that there is an un- 
checked outlet of this Bolshevik movement upon 
the Pacific Ocean? and that unless Japan checks 
it in Eastern Siberia it will fly outward, seeking 
its prey, prosperity, wherever it can be found? 
A great service can be rendered to civilization 
by stopping this Siberian outlet of anarchy, and 
because the Japanese are the only ones who can 



302 SOME CONCLUSIONS 

perform this service, all law-abiding men should 
encourage them to do so. I believe it would be 
a fine thing for international law and order if 
Japan should occupy Eastern Siberia and there 
set up such a dam against the outflow of law- 
lessness as would be afforded by her excellently 
functioning Government which is to-day assur- 
ing prosperity, liberty and the right to the pur- 
suit of happiness to her millions of industrious 
and frugal citizens. To an American peculiarly 
interested in America's interests first, such a step 
would have especial value if it could be coupled 
with the withdrawal of Japan from the Carohne 
and Marshall islands, for nothing would be more 
effective in bettering our relations than the ter- 
mination of that geographical threat to the Phil- 
ippines, and the substitution of a northwesterly 
Japanese expansion so promising for peace, in 
place of a southeasterly one so fruitful of misun- 
derstanding both with us and the British Empire 
as represented by Australasia. Then, too, the 
excessive preponderance of Japanese in Hawaii 
is unfortunate, but the solution of this bother- 
some problem can safely be left to the sagacious 
good taste of such a Government as the one 
which has so wisely announced the Ladies' 
Agreement. If these changes could be effected, 
then Japan would appear revealed to the cap- 



SOME CONCLUSIONS 303 

italists, the laborers and the business men of 
America as the bulwark of decent civilization 
against the Bolsheviki in Siberia and as a profit- 
able friend and ally in the vast field of Asian 
markets which she understands so well. 

But there is one error in our Far Eastern 
policy that these same serious folk of the United 
States should undertake to correct — ^we are not 
and never should have been a nursery governess 
for China! We are not called upon especially 
to protect the integrity of her territory, if indeed 
there be any left to protect. We can't warn 
the whole world off our hemisphere through the 
Monroe Doctrine, and at the same time dictate 
to Japan or any other power what they must 
not do in China. It is dangerous nonsense, and 
it is bad business. If we go into a consortium, 
then we should assist to carry out its protective 
terms to the uttermost, but unless and until 
we do, we ought to mind our own business in 
China. 

Here is outlined a Far Eastern policy that is 
fair to all because it honestly takes into account 
the viewpoint of all concerned. It will work, 
and it will work for American labor as effective- 
ly as for American capital. We don't want any 
territory in the Far East, but we do want an 
increasing shaie of her markets, sure to benefit 



304j some conclusions 

our labor and capital alike, and better relations 
with Japan inevitably lead to so desirable and 
profitable a result. 

Although we do not desire territory in tfie 
Far East, there is a tract which we should try 
to purchase, and, although it lies on our side of 
the Pacific, it can properly be discussed along 
with a Far Eastern policy. That tract is Lower 
California, which we should seek to pui'chase 
from Mexico. It lies well off her coast, but, for 
her, possesses little or no value. Geographically 
it is already a part of California, and should 
become so politically. In colonial times East 
Hampton and neighboring towns of eastern 
Long Island were part of New Haven colony 
across Long Island Sound, because close to it 
by sail and far removed from New York City, 
distant because of bad or no roads. So Lower 
California used to be nearer to the Mexican 
mainland than to American territory to the 
north, but just as the bettering of inland 
communication naturally swung eastern Long 
Island into a New York affiliation, so a railroad 
down the length of Lower CaHfornia would 
make mainland Mexico seem distant by com- 
parison with San Diego and her neighborhood. 
This territorial purdiase would remove a possi- 



SOME CONCLUSIONS 305 

ble element of friction in our Far Eastern rela- 
tions because it would prevent repetition of an 
unfortunate incident which accompanied Japan's 
presentation of her twenty-one demands upon 
China in 1915. The Japanese Minister to China, 
Mr. Hioki, received those demands from his 
Government in December, 1914, and it was not 
until May 8, 1915, that the Chinese Government 
formally accepted them. By an interesting co- 
incidence the Japanese cruiser "Asama" ran on 
a mudbank in Turtle Bay on the coast of Lower 
California in December, 1914, and was not com- 
pletely refloated and repaired until June, 1915, 
meanwhile being attended by from seven to ten 
Japanese warships and sundry auxiliary vessels. 
The American fleet was at that time in the 
Atlantic. From the time that Minister Hioki 
received the twenty-one demands for delivery to 
the Chinese Government until after they were 
acceded to by it, there was a strong Japanese 
fleet near that weak point in our western coast, 
the outlet of the Colorado River, which is the 
Nile of our far west. This points to the need 
for our purchase of Lower California. The 
whole transaction of which the twenty-one de- 
mands formed part is disapproved by business- 
men and by many political leaders in Japan who 
blame it to the militarists. It is doubtful if. 



306 SOME CONCLUSIONS 

after such a bungling misplay, those militarists 
will again be in a position to make such an ill- 
judged move. But it is just as well to admit 
service of their notice by removing the tempta- 
tion again to concentrate a strong foreign naval 
force in the Gulf of California so near the mouth 
of the Colorado River development and trans- 
continental railroad lines. The upper end of 
that gulf needs protection, and the purchase of 
Lower California is essential to that protection. 
We should press negotiations for the purchase 
of this tract, so useless to Mexico and remote 
from her mainland, and yet so close to us and 
so strategically important. 

The foregoing suggestions outline diplomatic 
steps comparatively easy of achievement, and 
fruitful of great good not only for our own 
people but also for all the Oriental peoples they 
affect. No "jug-handled" deals are here pro- 
posed, because agreements benefiting only one 
side do not last long. The other man's point of 
view must be considered in every transaction, as 
any successful business man will tell you — ^he 
knows it is the only way to build up a substantial 
business. It would be better if more statesmen 
learned what it means both of integrity and also 



SOME CONCLUSIONS 307 

of sagacious foresight to build up a substantial 
business, for it is along similar broad and 
friendly Enes that there should be readjusted 
and built up our Far Eastern policy. 






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